Maybe when I am 60, 70 or 80 the film industry will get their shi* together and finally agree on a solution that has long been found in the music business.

For a truly complete platform, I would FOR SURE pay more than the 10$ a month for Netflix. 20, maybe 30! But then I want it ALL. All films they have in storage.

I mean, it is 2017 and there are a lot of films I can't find on Netflix, Amazon Prime or, when I am in spending mood, on Apple TV. Why? I mean how silly would you want to be as studios? There is no big DVD business anymore, BlueRay never totally took off. People have a net connection and multiple streaming devices at home, thats it. Thats the big asset they could build on! Instead they let their libraries die the death of the unseen film.

Still, many keep shuffeling around harddrives with terabytes of pirated films. And why shouldn't they, as long as there is no substantial offer?

So I decided for me (and the cloud guy I am), that with my 3 services I have, I am ok. If a film is not there, I don't care. I surely won't order a DVD of some old film somewhere and I surely will not subscribe to another service. If Disneys pulls their films from Netflix: thanks Netflix for their growing self produced content that often has a quality not seen before.

In 1999, Qwest had a 30-second commercial that seemed incredibly futuristic at the time, talking about a hotel where "every room has every movie ever made in every language anytime day or night" and it seemed impossibly futuristic.

Not 20 years later, the technology for this is already well-established; the only thing stopping it is that the owners of the films don't want to make them available this way.

You'll actually have to go to .sh among the contenders (this is what I would suggest) as .io is not up anymore and besides .me was the original one.

It's linked on the official/original github repo[0]. But the official official[1] repo doesn't link anything. Just that original developers are supporting .sh as official and have apparently moved to it.

There's also ...ce.ch but that's community edition as the last two chars suggest.

Perhaps you're fortunate that everything you want to listen to is on your preferred music streaming service, but what they offer is far from everything in the music industry's catalogue. Ask any classical music fan what they think of streaming services and you'll hear a tirade against the woeful offerings that streaming services make available.

This is why I love Google Play Music, you can basically upload any kind of personally-acquired (legally or not) music to the service and it will seamlessly and transparently integrate with the platform itself and let you stream them wherever and whenever like any other.

They are stricter than Spotify with regional licenses unfortunately. I listen to a lot of Japanese artists that are on Spotify but not on GPM in Europe (but are there in Japan), I simply imported their albums and ripped them and uploaded them on the service and now they behave exactly the same. Not ideal, but still. For like 90% of the rest of the library (anecdotal experience at least) it's the same as Spotify, which is pretty great.

DISCLAIMER: I work at Google, but I've been using GPM long before that. These are my opinions and not those of my employer, yadda yadda.

I love Google Play Music for exactly this reason: I have 20k songs uploaded and counting. No other service is offering anything close.
Sadly the team seems to have recently scaled back on the "Your library" features in favor of radio (where they can insert ads), neutering the Instant Mix feature, removing the ability to make a "Feeling Lucky" mix of my uploaded music, and re-jiggering the interface to push Radio harder.

The thing is, the paid tier of GPM is really only for on-demand streaming of the music catalogue and removing ads in the radio. As an upload-only user, I really see no reason to pay money for a service that I am fully enjoying for free. If Google were to add back (and continue developing) the removed My Library features and decide to make a payment tier for use-cases like mine, I'd happily subscribe. Their focus on "your library anywhere, with extra features" is something that really stands out. I'd hate to see GPM turn into just another stream-what's-licensed service.

It's still silly to upload all the music I have that they don't when they probably do already store it for someone else. Just checksum my files to ~prove that I have it. I'm sure no one cares enough about it to generate hash collisions for MP3s. Do they really store unique copies of every mp3 for ever user? That seems insanely inefficient, and yet I wouldn't be surprised if their contracts with the music industry stipulated that they couldn't share files between users.

I was on Google Play Music from the beginning, and only left when they cancelled my early access plan without asking me and refused to reinstate it. Apple Music has leapfrogged them in every way, and Google Music has only regressed since launch, especially in terms of UX.

I did really like Google Play Music, and allowing the local library sync as a free draw was a really smart move. But the sour taste they left in my mouth by killing my discount plan and ruining the UX meant I looked at other options. Signed up for Apple Music day one and it has improved leaps and bounds since then.

It's very clearly a huge priority for Apple, and they aren't resting on it.

I keep hearing that there may be problems with Apple Music, such as replacing local files. Having quite a lot of content which is ripped from vinyl I'm hesitant to try it. Have you had any difficulties with it?

I've never had it replace local files. I would say you should back up your music collection like anything else in case something happens, but as long as the files are there locally I see no reason why it would replace them.

Maybe it wants to "move" everything to your local library and messes it up / puts it into some idiotic inaccessible format like Photos. Then you can "export" them as "raw" which takes hours and will crash / just stop a bit of the way in. I've had bad luck with the photos app with just ~10k photos. I still miss Aperture.

I used to use Google Play Music, and it was very nice. But for anyone who has a reaaaaalllly big library I might suggest something like Ampache (http://ampache.org/).

It's totally open source, has a relatively decent web player, allows you to stream your music anywhere, allows you to create accounts for others to have access to your music, can connect with Plex/subsonic to work with other devices/clients. I use DSub on my phone, and can sync music offline (like GPlay Music). Only downsides really is that it requires a web server and the initial import can take some time if your library is very large.

Amazon does the same thing. Although their "free" storage tier is a bit anemic, and they want an extra couple bucks a month for a generous tier (since they're a couple bucks cheaper with a Prime membership, that would basically take you back to square one). However, their differentiator is that everybody gets unlimited storage for content purchased from Amazon.

I keep hearing about how nimble and agile Spotify is, and how their tech stack and team structure lets them add features quickly. I wonder why they haven't offered upload storage yet, and whether that's coming?

Apple Music is the same. The first time you add it will apply their (shit) deduping, but if you delete and add your files again it will consider your version the "real" ones and upload them to the cloud

I use Google Play Books for exactly this same reason. Yeah, I can buy books from anyone, but there are plenty of things that are either out of copyright that I want to read (so, Project Gutenberg), or I own a physical copy and want digital (and don't want to pay again for simply the format change), or similar, and having everything in one place easily makes it so Google Play Books is the only place I will buy DRMed ebooks.

I love stuff from Japan as well, and from what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of Japanese music on the US Apple Music, and it’s also fairly easy to create a Japanese iTunes account to get a free 3 month trial of the JP Apple Music store.

You don't need "everything" but you need enough. If you subscribe to e.g Spotify you initially get surprised by some things not being in their library. However the library is so large and the use of a single service so convenient that most people can simply accept what's there. After the initial disappointment, any further disappointment is nearly zero so long as you keep all your discovery of new music within Spotify - because you'll never discover what isn't there.

Classical is a bit special, but hopefully efforts like the internet archive can help bring at least a lot of the royalty free music to streaming.

I'd be perfectly happy with a streaming service aggregating the current top 10 services for tv/movies, and I assume 90% of customers would. It seems reasonable to make a product that caters to "most" rather the all customers, just like Spotify.

No. I am a huge music nerd. It's my life's passion. I need everything. If it is not everything, it's not enough.

In the past, technically savvy music nerds like me had options. LPs and CDs as a distribution format offered true permanence. Vinyl when cared for properly usually outlives the owner. CDs can be ripped and archived with perfect 1:1 accuracy.

These formats don't disappear from my record shelves at the whim of an executive or a change to a silly end user license agreement. They're mine forever, for me to cherish and learn from for as long as I want.

Until the music industry offers this type of solution for the digital music ecosystem, they will not be adequately serving music's most dedicated and passionate patrons.

Bandcamp is the only service that comes close to delivering the proper solution. But they are so uncompromising in their ideals that the 'industry' will not work with them. It's too bad, because they and DistroKid are the only two online music industry services I have ever seen that are genuinely interested in furthering the lives of their users.

Forgive my bluntness, but this is a disingenuous comment. LPs and CDs may still exist, but they are obviously not a supported distribution format by the music industry anymore - with the country of Japan being the only glaring exception.

"so long as you keep all your discovery of new music within Spotify - because you'll never discover what isn't there."

This is exactly the reason we have arguments about the importance of net neutrality - which your underlying point is arguing directly against. Not sure if that was intentional or not - but the music industry is a really bad measuring stick of success in this area.

To contrast to Spotify - I'm sure Disney would be fine with it if everyone watched what they were hosting on their network exclusively and ignored the content on other platforms.

On a side note: Isn't this basically what Disney Life is already? Did I miss something?

I'm on one hand very much a proponent of net neutrality but I'm also lazy and was hoping competition would result in the best user experience and not silos.

I wasn't trying to make an argument either way on what's good/bad with Spotify (or any service large enough to be used as an only provider) but my feeling of missing out on something is something I try to avoid more than actually missing out on something (if that makes any sense). A kind of loss aversion I suppose. Bryter to have less and not know, than have more and see what you are missing.

I understand that you like to discover new music. But for me it's the other way around, I like to discover old stuff. Basically, things that I should I've listened at 30 years ago. Moreover, in that old stuff, it's always things that I've missed at that time, so most of the time, it's very niche stuff (old EBM tracks, obscure new wave bands, etc.); if it was not niche, then I wouldn't have missed it. So for me, the current services are not broad enough... Because I'm interested in the 1% that didn't make it... YouTube remains, for me, the best option (because many people upload things without looking at rights issues and because old-and-niche music is not worth protecting)

Torrent sites are also serving this need, but the barriers to entry are high. There's not many (or any) distribution channels for some of this stuff today. If you're looking for some old screamo that was only released in small numbers on vinyl, good luck finding it. That's an extreme example, but really we're talking about preserving art here. Some art has millions of prints, some was one-time performance art. The music industry will only sell you a very small % of what has been created.

Grooveshark was a lot better than Spotify, both in functionality and in offering, but alas...

Youtube is probably the most complete but (1) I don't want to waste bandwidth on downloading the video every time I try to listen to music and (2) it's missing the discovery component that dedicated music services have.

But why would you download a (probably illegal) rip that is poor quality, when the act of downloading and keeping the rip is probably illegal in itself (not exactly sure about that) from a platform that is notoriously unsuitable for music when you could just download high-quality release from a music tracker specially optimised for this use case?

I mean, if you are ok with doing something (probably) illegal, why not get the best experience out of it?

I agree with your sentiments, but to play devil's advocate grabbing music from youtube protects you from DMCA notices from your ISP, is always available (no having to wait for seeds/peers on more obscure music), and is much safer (for an average person) where content on public trackers has some risk of containing malware/virus/etc.

From what I understand, the audio and video are simply different streams that you can selectively download from the youtube servers. So it is entirely possible to only download the audio, I've done it many times with youtube-dl.

I was going to make some comment about the corollary being that I don't care that old, B-rate, black-and-white films wouldn't be on the service, but then I remembered that there are some surprising gaps in the Google Play library. Don Henley and Bob Seeger are notably absent. As a child of the 80's, I find this sad, and I think most everyone would be disappointed to find that Hotel California is not available on the service. Thank goodness they finally added Zep.

I know that spotify/Apple Music are lacking in certain areas, however pretty much all "mainstream" music from the last 40(?) years is available on both platforms. Comparing that to Netflix, where searching for "top tv shows of the 1990's" will give you a list, of which less than 30% are available on netflix here. Worse still, they're available in other countries.

Have a look at idagio.com it is a hand curated streaming service for classical music.
I got the early bird offer for 5€ a month which is incredible! Especially because they have lossless quality streaming!

Problem with streaming services like Spotify is also that, while you're paying and therefore fulfilling the legal aspect of copyright, my favourite artists see a negligible amount of that money, it's a shit deal for them, and if I look at it in honest I don't particularly feel a lot better about it vs pirating mp3s and buying the occasional album.

The fact is that Disney is extremely savvy and knows how to produce content that sells with a nearly 100% success rate. They are simply a marketing and merchandising machine.

They use the vault the way diamond miners do- to restrict supply of extremely coveted goods so that they can charge premium prices for them. It's good business and it keeps things that are decades old in constant demand so they can charge higher prices for them.

Unfortunately for you and me that means that if we want access we have to pay more. While it may certainly be true that you don't place enough value on Disney products to pay a premium, there are lots of people who will and there are probably still going to be times that you want access to it and consider signing up. That's what they want- if they commoditized their content and you were able to get access to everything they own for $30 a month, that wouldn't serve their purposes at all. Companies like Netflix dream of having one franchise that's as successful as the countless ones that Disney has. Why on Earth would they just have a fire sale for all of their content when they can restrict supply and extract the most profit from it?

Because Disney aren't just competing with Netflix and co; they're also competing with usenet services, torrents, Kodi streams and other illegal services. And because Disney keep fucking their own consumers about it's left a void where the illegal services have not only been able to raise the bar in terms of user experience, but also in terms of available content and video quality.

In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under. But because copyright laws give content owners a monopoly it means the only effective competition is illegal services. And the daft thing is they're literally better in every way. Which is why I know so many people who normally follow the letter of the law and who happily pay for expensive cable / satellite / Netflix / whatever subscriptions who also have absolutely no qualms in downloading or streaming movies illegally. These are customers who want to pay for services but end up pirating because there isn't any service available to them.

It's completely bonkers. It shouldn't be like this but it is entirely the fault of the content industry. They created the void by monopolising their content and then failing to provide any practical services. And they created the demand by targeting their advertising at kids, by making it illegal to backup old formats like DVDs, and such like.

So to answer your question, sure they can try to extract the most profit from it but customers are already angry, fed up and aware of better albeit illegal services so all Disney are going to do is drive more people to piracy. If they really wanted to extract more profit then they would trying to onboard more users instead of making their content harder to get hold of. It really feels like the whole FRAND patents situation where Disney are happy to become a critical part of pre-teen culture but don't want to licence their intellectual property in any reasonable way. And while I can happily make the decision not to watch any Disney movies again (I like Marvel but I can live without it), trying to explain that to my 3 and 6 year old is going to be much harder.

So the only alternative to paying for something you don't own is to steal it and pretend that you're somehow justified because you don't agree with the way the law is written?

In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under.

Could you expound on this a bit? Disney owns the rights to distribute the products that it has spent billions of dollars to create and you take issue with that? What is the alternative- if you write a best-selling novel, or create a film or a song that people want, the government should force you to distribute it in such a way that guarantees that anybody who wants it can have it? We're talking about movies, not health care. I don't really see how you can make a cogent case that you have a right to access the content on your terms.

I am a music composer and audio engineer. My music is pretty niche. If someone were to ask me if I'd rather that they buy my music or 'steal' it from a torrent site that offers a 100% pure FLAC rip, I'd tell them the latter. Because the torrent site is the only one which has respect for my hard work, and has the users who are passionate and thankful for my work being available to them.

Services like Spotify are not designed to facilitate 30 minute long experimental electroacoustic violin compositions. I am much more likely to gain a dedicated fan (someone who will pay to see my concerts in their city) from a torrent site which is content-agnostic and facilitates true fandom for the less conventional music offerings out there.

I mean no offense, but you aren't Disney. Disney has been actively developing, innovating, and acquiring a huge library of content with proven demand for nearly a century. Clearly their priority is selling and licensing content. It sounds like your priority is getting your music in the hands of people who appreciate it in the best format possible. That's very respectable, but that's not how most companies operate.

> So the only alternative to paying for something you don't own is to steal it and pretend that you're somehow justified because you don't agree with the way the law is written?

Well laws are meant to be interpreted rather than followed verbatim. But that genuinely wasn't the point of my post and I'm certainly not advocating piracy. That doesn't mean I have to agree with how the movie industry is run either.

My point was that Disney should be upping their game to make their content more accessible rather than making it harder and using their monopoly via intellectual property laws to force their market position. That just seems really disingenuous with the point of intellectual property - like how Apple and Samsung went to war.

Copyright law wasn't intended to last the period of time it does. In fact copyright law was first conceived to allow publishers to make money from publishing but then the information was always intended to go into the public domain. Granted we are talking about 300ish years of history (IIRC) and times change but given the profits Disney are raking in you can hardly argue that they haven't recouped their production costs. However I'm not trying to argue against capitalism here either. My real issue with Disney is that they have been one of the biggest campaigners of extending copyright law, and also one of the biggest abusers of the public domain with a multitude of stories adapted and then trademarked (Jungle Book, Little Mermaid, Cinderella, etc). They make billions from "stealing" public domain stories and yet people like yourself complain if someone suggests pirating Disney's work as an alternative (I'm not by the way, but you assumed I had) and that seems somewhat unfair in the general sense when Disney have intentionally priced themselves out of reach for many parents. As an aside: I think the fact that Disney often targets younger audiences really helps them here as well because it makes it harder for parents to boycott their services.

This is why I say I'd rather see them working with existing providers instead of running their services in their own silo forcing people to pay for yet another subscription service just to access Disney content. You're right they have no legal nor economic obligation to do so; but I think respecting your customers wishes should count for something given that in any other industry customers could vote with their feet and easily switch services.

Part of what makes Disney Disney is that their content is extremely guarded and restricted. This makes the perceived value higher.

Let's take straight-to-DVD movies for example. Anytime a movie is released straight-to-DVD, that immediately signals to the market that it's a lower-budget, lesser-quality movie. Yet that's a far more effective way to get it the widest possible distribution than screening it in select theaters for a $14 admission fee.

This is essentially what Disney does. Disney has earned a brand that distinguishes its movies from any other movie producer out there. When Disney makes a movie, people want to see it, because Disney has a certain standard of quality. That's not to say that I think every movie Disney makes is gold, just that every movie that Disney makes is perceived as gold by the public. The reason for that is that Disney guards its IP perhaps more stringently than any company. They don't make all of their movies available to everyone and they don't have buffet-style streaming ala Netflix. Anytime a potential competitor arises, they buy them. They now own Marvel and the Star Wars franchise, as well as Pixar and probably several others that I'm forgetting.

I'd argue that if Disney did stream all of their movies online for a flat rate to any and all who will add it to their lineup for an affordable rate (YouTube TV, Directv Now, Sling, Hulu, etc.) they would instantly lose a huge part of what makes their brand so powerful.

They actually did this in the 80's- they had their own channel that you had to get a separate cable box for to stream it into your home.

I'm not so convinced that true though. As I said in my post, I know plenty of people who have Sky / Virgin Media as well as Amazon Prime and/or Netflix subscriptions but who do also pirate content when they can't find what that want on the aforementioned.

There are only so many video subscription services a person is willing to pay for.

Maybe Disney have a compelling enough catalogue to convince people to switch away from an existing streaming service (which is what I think they're banking on), but I'm not so convinced that will happen at scale either.

Maybe their traditional animated movies but Disney have expanded out quite a bit in recent year.

The Pixar movies are loved by my kids and while they're still a bit young for the Marvel stuff the eldest is already a big superhero fan (particularly Spiderman) so I can see him really enjoying Disney's Marvel universe when he is older. And lets not forget how seminal Star Wars is even with the younger generation.

So I'm not so sure I'm ready to write Disney off with regards to the Netflix generation.

Disney is still crazy important. They own pretty much everyone's childhoods now between Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. You can't say with a straight face that these properties aren't important anymore. If anything, Marvel and Star Wars have become even bigger since Disney's taken ownership.

Curious. Why do you prefer Apple Music? Has something changed recently? I had both for a while but found the UI, playlist building capacity, the generated playlists, and the ability to share music on Spotify to be superior so I dropped Apple.

Howdy, I have been running both macOS and iOS betas on my personal devices and both iTunes and Music have had a significant UX overhaul on macOS 10.13 and iOS 11, they’re not perfect - but it’s a good step forward.

A bit high level but here’s my list of pros:

- I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify.

- Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify.

- Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone.

- The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone.

- Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone)

- The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality)

What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve:

- Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly.

- Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.

It sounds as though the spotify IOS client is somewhat behind on features compared to android. That, or its not obvious enough how to access some of these features, because many of these are available on android such as :
changing stream quality for bandwidth, and downloading music on phone, using own music on phone (admittedly a bit of a hassle, you have to put it on a playlist on pc then sync download that playlist on mobile)

> using own music on phone (admittedly a bit of a hassle, you have to put it on a playlist on pc then sync download that playlist on mobile)

This really isn't the same thing at all. With Apple Music or Google Play Music, your own library and cloud tracks are seamlessly integrated and can be streamed and accessed from anywhere and any device.

A kludgy solution where you can use Spotify like a 90s MP3 player really doesn't cut it. If Apple, Google and Deezer can offer local library support, Spotify has no excuse. It's a huge gap, and makes Spotify unusable for many people or only supplementary.

I don't expect a streaming service to have everything in history all the time, just have as much as possible, and let me fill in the gaps.

Apple Music is rapidly evolving. They're putting a lot of effort into it.

OS integration is a big one for me, Apple Music is just so seamless. Personally I hate the Spotify UI, search is among the worst, and just like Google Music I find it has way too much Karaoke bullshit cluttering up results when it doesn't have the song you want.

That plus Spotify having no way to upload your own local files makes it a complete non-starter for me. Apple Music is getting way better on the radio & playlist front. The New Music Mix knows me surprisingly well.

I'd give it another shot if you haven't tried in the last 6 months to a year.

It's only about 6K best case scenario and usually a little under 4K in practical resolution. Of course some of the major 6K or 8K cameras on the market are only a little better than half that in practical resolution. There's also a lot more to final image quality than just raw pixels or grain, it's just a small piece of the puzzle and why a 3.2K camera may look substantially better than a 6K alternative.

Indeed and there's many methods for this that are being used to restore many old films from archive. Modern film cameras used by major networks record at 4K-6K (full open). Beyond that even if the cameras on set are recording at 3.2K or 2K pro-res etc... it doesn't mean that the post-production and up-scaling upon rendering doesn't benefit from a final output of 4K. Finally - we must think to the future and not hold back technology to the lowest common denominator.

VFX are substantially more expensive to complete at higher resolutions. Even in major films released at 4K, fx are frequently lower resolutions because of time and budget constraints. Going back and rescanning older films that have lots of cgi usually results in very ugly vfx scenes.

And again, resolution is just a small component of the final image quality. There is a major 3.2(ish)K camera on the market that has substantially better IQ than 4 and 6K alternatives. And another 6K camera that has substantially better IQ than 8K options.

As for upscaling, we're probably better off leaving that for the end user as better upscaling algos are created and deployed all the time and baking it in from the studio locks us into what will soon be old methodology.

The only way I found to actually get 1080p for all content on Netflix on a PC was to use the Windows 10 Netflix app. In any browser, some of the content would be 720p or 480p otherwise. Edge gave 1080p sometimes, but Firefox and Chrome maxed out at 720p in all cases where I looked at it (Ctrl+alt+shift+D to see the actual resolution).

I don't want to advance anything (don't have time to find the source), but I think Apple have something special built in Safari/Webkit for Netflix. That relate to decoding, quality and battery combustion while streaming.

I'd pay more than £40 for it; right now I pay £12/month for a TV licence (basically a BBC subscription fee), £20/month to sky, and £7.50/month to Netflix. I've also paid £7.99/month for Amazon for a few months to try out prime video, but never found it worthwhile. That's just for TV/movie content. I don't want to manage 4/5/6 subscriptions.

Not quite. In an ideal world, I want Spotify for movies (every mainstream movie in the last 40 years pretty much on demand in HQ and reliable access) and I'm willing to pay for it, like I do with Spotify. (I'd be willing to pay Spotify lots more but they don't have a bonus plan to pay more).

The same way you like your video content to be high quality and have devices that allow you to enjoy such quality, I want to do the same for music. I have a high quality sound system and I want to listen to lossless music.

And subscription services are not even an option. Neither are the popular music selling services (iTunes / Google Play Music / Amazon). Luckily, I listen to a lot of electronic music, so I can pay ~$0.5 dollars more per song to get lossless quality on Beatport[0] and Juno[1]. My free estimate is that I was able to chase down ~30% of my music collection in lossless formats[2].

Dirty secret of video: The resolution matters a lot less than people tend to claim. Pixels are not created equal. I can easily give you a "24K" video stream with the same bitrate as your current 720p stream. It may choke your video card dealing with it and you may have nothing that can display it, but I can give it to you, easily. It just won't look any better than the 720p stream and will probably look worse (due to the compression algorithm blocks now being too small to work properly).

I've seen "1080p" streams that were of lower quality than a DVD release, to say nothing of the BluRay you mention, which are better than DVDs both in encoding quality and bitrate, making them actually quite a bit better than DVD.

Bitrate matters a lot more. Only once your bitrate has saturated a given resolution is it really worth moving up to the next resolution.

I actually like "4K" streams because to even pretend to be 4K, they have to bump the bitrate up. Prior to me getting a 4K TV, I played some 4K streams to my 1080P display, and they were of a visibly higher quality than the 1080P streams. You're not "supposed" to do that test; it really breaks the 4K illusion. (You can do this with youtube-dl by forcing it to grab the 4K stream and then playing it on something with enough hardware acceleration to still play it at 1080P. You can't just go to YouTube with a 1080P display because it'll feed you the 1080P version of the stream even if the video name has "4K" in it.)

(Another place you can see this is cameras, especially cell phone cameras. Take your cell phone outside into broad daylight and take a well-focused photo of pretty much anything. Take the photo in to your computer and zoom in until every pixel of the photo is three or four pixels on your monitor. Can you find sharp color changes between those pixels, or does it look like your camera snuck an impressionist Instragram filter into your picture when you weren't looking? A lot of us have high end phones that may be able to pass this test, though as the megapixel count keeps jumping even that may be dubious, but even mid-range phones can't. That said, they may still be taking very, very good photos, especially considering all the headwinds a phone camera faces optically. It's just that they're very good 4MP photos rather than 12MP photos.)

(I'd love some sort of JPEG processor that analyzes a photo for its real information/high-frequency content, and then downsizes the JPG to accurately reflect its real information content. You can get big savings on both digital camera photos and videos by doing this, integer multiples of the file size with no visible differences when examined side-by-side, but it's quite tedious by hand. Perhaps the promise of BIG SAVINGS would encourage a DropBox or some photo startup employee to have a look at this?)

> Dirty secret of video: The resolution matters a lot less than people tend to claim.

Precisely. Video compression is about reducing redundancies. A perfect lossless video compressor would essentially take a bitmap format and turn it into a vector format. Vector formats have no inherent resolution.

Now real life compressors are neither lossless, nor perfect, but it's easy to see that the better they better they become, they more and more become resolution-independent, in a way.

Compression performance depends on the ratio between the information entropy of the input and output signal, which only loosely correlate with resolution.

> Another place you can see this is cameras, especially cell phone cameras.

Yeah, you can also see this with medium format camera backs. They will produce better images at a given target resolution than a full frame sensor at the same target resolution. Most people don't expect an old medium-format back that "only" has 30Mpix to be any better than a current full frame sensor of the same resolution, but blow images at 100% and the medium format simply has more detail.

I want to know what sort of cameras can consistently capture the kinds of photos I see online where everything is just refreshingly sharp and properly lit. I know user skill is a big part of that but for a while I've wondered what sort of hardware to optimize for to get shots that are not amazing but just properly well-focused.

I also want to do a similar thing to your "JPEG irreducible complexity" test: I want to, given a series of photos, find the one with the least artifacts. This is mostly for JPG as well, but for photos that can rank stuff that's gone through the Twitter/etc can opener (and been decoded and reencoded umpteen times in the process), so it's possible that doing purely codec-level analysis may or may not rank accurately.

For me I think movies mean less than they used to. We are spoiled with the amount of entertainment constantly being released to us nowadays. I will not go buy a movie or see a movie at the theater anymore - no matter what it is. It could be the most anticipated film in a half a decade and I'll still wait for it to be conveniently streamed to me. Maybe I'm getting old, but I feel like people don't create movie libraries anymore unless they're pirates. We don't have 1 specific night a week where we get everyone together for a special movie. We watch movies and shows all the time and that makes them less special/valuable. I don't think I'm articulating this well.

Disney thinks I'll tack on another streaming service to watch Mulan or Captain America: Civil War - but they're wrong...

> I will not go buy a movie or see a movie at the theater anymore - no matter what it is. It could be the most anticipated film in a half a decade and I'll still wait for it to be conveniently streamed to me.

I feel much the same way, but I'll add one thing: I find I spend too much time passively consuming, to the point I am trying to bring back a 1 specific night a week to watch something I think will be edifying and entertaining.

Instead of buying ad space on torrent sites (let's say), they lecture people who have actually bought the DVD. And, those who download the movie illegally can skip that, only those who actually have the DVD watch it.

The other day, I pirated a disney movie that I already own on DVD, because who the hell has the time to sit through 20 unskippable previews, and then an excessively animated DVD menu, and then go through a badly paginated list of scenes to try and find where you left off- but the streaming pirate site just let me click to the exact point I left off, within seconds.

So the thought process is:
"I want this"
"I am not allowed this"
"I should be allowed this"
"I will take it anyway"

This is seductive, easy, and the wrong way to go for most things.

I understand the frustration. I have felt the same way many, many times. I suspect that if people who illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight.

> illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight

So if you cannot get something legally easily, you should support that practice and suddenly you'll get it more easily in future? This in a post about an article where Disney is making it more difficult to get content legally? Really?

Perhaps that's why people don't think that for other things, but constrain that argument to digital distribution.

Note that the other way (accept whatever meagre or exorbitant distribution deals the content owner wants or stay without content) also has big issues, especially if one believes movies, music, books, etc are essential to culture.

...yes, these are all true statements and you should use correct descriptions of you want to be understood.

- calling pirates thieves is a leap that will undermine your argument by assuming harm that's not shown
- have any serious discussion about Frankenstein's morality while confusing him with his monster and no one will understand you
- I write this from a Linux device, but because it is an Android/Linux device is has a completely different experience than a GNU/Linux system, and you can have that experience on GNU/kFreeBSD or GNU/NT just as well.

Semantics matter. Words make a difference. Please don't miscommunicate just because misunderstanding helps your side in an argument.

Anyway, it seems I hit a nerve. I used to be one of those piracy is not stealing people, back when I pirated content. Now that I pay for content I can look back at that person and understand that cognitive dissonance between my notion of myself as a good person and the fact that I was pirating content led me to consider piracy a good thing, or at the least not a bad thing.

Because really, what is being said with the semantics argument "piracy != stealing"? It is about how harmful piracy is, whether it really is as bad as stealing, and fundamentally whether or not we should have copyright at all. If we should have copyright, then we must have legal tools to enforce it, and piracy must be illegal and wrong. If we shouldn't have copyright, then piracy is a form of freedom fighting and should be encouraged.

My opinion on the matter is that we should have copyright, but that it should be more limited in duration, with stronger fair use exceptions (like the right to decrypt for the purpose of backup and archival). I don't care for the semantics argument. Call it piracy or call it stealing, it does not change what is being done: taking things without permission.

In this case, society adopted the word "piracy" to represent the new semantic, whereas the recording industry chose "stealing" so as to conflate the issue. The word war is not a neutral process.

> copyright existed before digital content too

And it's application in modern times is increasingly contrived and outdated. Since when was it decided that mandatory "remastering" was a reasonable condition to repay for a media all over again? Why would I have to pay additional fees just to use a different medium (mobile phone vs laptop, for example).

But I already paid. The seller is also asking to control the medium. That does not happen with everything else. In fact, there has been a creep toward control in the hands of distributers (e.g. Amazon deleting recalled ebooks off the devices they sold to you).

This isn't just a case "seller has product, seller sets price". The landscape of available products is being purposefully manipulated to expand the number of different products that exist e.g I'd consider a digital movie file to be one 'product', independent to whatever medium I choose to play it on; But the movie industry might advocate for a separate 'product' per medium.

At that point it's not even related to the original "artist"/creator or their compensation - I'm now dealing with middlemen actively lobbying to create new forms of compensation, and restricting the ways in which I can access certain services without them. In the example I gave above, "remastering" is an excuse to charge for the same product on a different medium. There might be compensatory charges on top of DVDs that go to offset piracy, but there will never be compensation for consumers who already bought a film on a different format (VHS, for example) - the advantage only ever goes one way, so I don't care what narratives industry lawyers care to craft - piracy provides a necessary pressure to prevent consumers being taken advantage of even more.

Who decides? Politicians romanced by industry lobbyists? Why should the government/public bear the costs for legislating such things?

> So, isn't that to their discretion?

Now you are switching from "what is right" to "what is legal". The law is dictated by society, based on common morality.

> they show there's value to what the sellers are trying to sell.

And that value exists under a mandatory layer of DRM. And sometimes enforced by industry-sponsored legislation. Your assumption of value (or the power to boycott) ignore the monopolisation of media formats - When all computers contain a "DRM-chip" then "all I have to do" is boycott it? And what if they are mandatory by law - just oppose it? The general public is susceptible to targeted divide-and-conquer tactics, which doesn't result in a true representation or expression of public opinion at the mercy of industry motives.

> They could have boycotted the whole thing.

They did - they pirated. They didn't just boycott the technology, but the law as well - that shows that the public do not value those laws, and the laws were erected in contradiction to the will of the people. No?

> It's their thing, so they get to set their rules for giving access to it.

The government isn't "their thing". They need to negotiate with the rest of society if they want anyone else to enforce those rules.

> What's immoral about "I created Star Wars

You are ignoring a lot of what I wrote about monopolising middle-men, or the role/interest of government in actively enforcing these "propositions".

Do you also not believe in "resale" laws?

> Only as much as DIU shows

Yes, I don't believe this either, I think these kinds of argument are specious. And people acting under under DUIs are a) under the influence, not at their full rational capacity b) a minority, most people support DUI laws.

If I pirate your film, you may or may not have lost out on a sale. Probably I wasn't willing to pay for your awful SpywareDataHarvesting as a Service content platform so it's debatable whether or not you truly lost anything.

I lost control over my work. How about that? Even if I haven't lost the original, who exactly gave you the permission to watch my work?

Do you also sneak into live shows without paying the cover charge? After all a live band doesn't lose money when you sneak into the theater either. And you can argue that you might have never opted to pay the ticket in the first place if you couldn't sneak. So, as long as there's enough room for other people and you're not causing them lost tickets, it's ok too?

If you live in the US, the act of buying a movie and watching it immediately (without trailers or adverts) is about as simple as you can get. iTunes, Xbox Store, YouTube/Google Play, etc. all offer what are essentially one-click purchases and/or rentals, and the most you get is an interstitial menu defaulted to "play" (with other options for special features and jump to chapter).

What about this scenario -- you decided to BUY the movie via Blu-Ray or DVD, but then they force you to go through and see the previews before letting you watch the movie you bought. And not letting you skip the previews. These companies don't have a clue.

> thanks Netflix for their growing self produced content that often has a quality not seen before

s/often/rarely

There are some good shows on Netflix, but they are in the minority, in my opinion. Tastes vary, of course. But a lot of their original programming is not so original, it just feels like filler content to increase the perceived value of the platform. For every good original show they make like House of Cards, there are at least 5x as many that are uneventful or boring.

I find them better than TV, pound for pound. For example, _Backstrom_ is a shitty House clone in many senses, but is a much better detective show than _Elementary_.

They have more feedback data and often great "production values" (i.e. they spent the extra money to make it nice). It doesn't always pay off (how stupid was _Marseille_, with Gerard Depardieu at his best acting chops in years and a political story that melts into family drama in three episodes flat?).

But having 100 Netflix shows and a random assortment of failed indie movies is not better than having 10 Netflix shows and a decent film catalog. Netflix pretty much snuck up on the less attentive of us by giving us more shows (hey, I basically stayed for Bojack Horseman) and taking away feature-length studio-produced movies.

Uh, Backstrom was a broadcast (Fox) series cancelled after a single season. It's not a Netflix original, so it's alleged superiority to successful broadcast series like Elementary is not, even granting for the sake of argument that it is superior, an indication of the superiority of Netflix's shows.

And the movie business. And the music business. And the book-publishing business. In any creative industry, there are hundreds or thousands of mediocre-to-terrible attempts for any hit. It's the nature of the beast. Shaving that ratio by orders of magnitude is black magic, or even just luck. This is why successful outliers are so handsomely paid - not because they do something well, but because they dramatically decrease the risk of producing stuff that won't sell enough.

The saying that goes "90% of everything is crap" emerged before Netflix was even a concept.

Sure, it's not as convenient as instant streaming, but the Netflix DVD shipping catalog is unparalleled. Every old movie you can think of plus new releases as soon as they release on DVD. Well worth what I pay since I'm patient enough to wait a couple days for the disk. Plus, if you pay a little extra for the blu-ray service the quality is way better than streaming "HD".

I got the urge to watch Total Recall, the original version. (Please don't judge me!) Is it available on Netflix where I am? Nope. HBO? No. Amazon Prime video? No! Now, Amazon does offer a digital rental - for 8 bucks!

It seems I have to install their software on my computer to see what the price is. I'm being curmudgeonly here, I know, but I'm not keen on installing iTunes, my previous experiences with that and other software on Windows were not that great.

While it is a bit of time invested initially it can be very handy to keep a Windows VM around for this purpose. Make sure to keep a baseline snapshot after patching. This way you can install questionable software with full confidence it won't impact your main system. You can simply revert to the baseline snapshot at any time to uninstall the software.

I love my Chromecast, but isn't this discussion about accessing content?

If the content owners don't let you access their content (or they make it a burden to access it by requiring a subscription for another service) it doesn't matter if you have a device that can output an HDMI signal.

This is slightly off-topic, but the Chromecast Ultra, with the Ethernet connection, is an absolute beast.

I'm lucky enough to have Ethernet in my whole flat (two drops in every room), and a gigabit internet connection. When I launch a 4K HDR video on YouTube, it literally takes less than two seconds to start playing. In comparison, the YouTube app on the TV takes 5-10 seconds to start playing. The TV is hardwired as well. Please note that the Chromecast only has a 100Mbit ethernet port, same as a RPi, or most smart TVs.

I thought the original Chromecast was great. But even if you have a great wifi setup, get the Ethernet power plug. It will change your Chromecast. You don't need the Chromecast Ultra to use the Ethernet feature, just a second generation Chromecast (the round one)

Because there aren't enough people like you who would to pay for it to cover the costs of even a lawyer reviewing the contracts to see who owns the rights (and the answer will be not a single party, actors/music/artwork etc rights involved in all will be incredibly complex), never mind actually pay anyone involved.

There are lots of things I would like someone to make at a reasonable price too (roll on my line of all existing Transformers with chrome finishes, car paint, clear windows and chrome tire rims!). But I have to accept that there's not enough of me that the costs of that sort of thing come down to $10, and buy a limited subset of more expensive items instead.

We need better legislation around orphaned works; those whose ownership is too complex to resolve should be treated the same as those whose ownership is completely lost. In both cases, ownership can't be reasonably determined.

There was this idea that if you had all movies available the long tail (obscure, old etc movies) would still be watched by at least some people, but in practice most people just stick to what's new/mainstream/known, so that it's not worth the extra hassle to maintain a long tail library.

Tons of tracks on online music stores for example are never streamed or only a handful of times.

(Of course the limited stuff e.g. Netflix has, is by no means not even the 10% of possible content).

But even if so, can those few not sufficiently monetize things to warrant the storage and delivery costs? I mean, yeah, old movies once had their original film melted down, but for the past 80 years they've at least thrown it into a vault or similar. Physical storage is orders of magnitudes more expensive than digital; even just dropping these things into an S3 bucket and serving them as needed for .10 cents would cost less than what they used to do, -and- would allow them to actually make money from it (albeit very little).

If you don't want -any- of that, then why not release it for free and allow things like the internet archive to store it and deliver it for you? It's worth the money to store it -in case- you want to do something with it, but not worth the money to actually do something with it, even though that costs no more and has a return on investment?

That doesn't explain why a 20 year old movie will pop up on a streaming service for a few months then be unavailable again. Clearly they can sort these issues out. The content companies are stuck in a model of artificial scarcity.

For myself, when I get the itch to watch an old movie and I can't immediately find it on the Netflix or Amazon prime video I don't go try to find some other streaming service or pay for a one time viewing. I'll just find something else to watch that is available. So when they could have had one more view for old content they wouldn't otherwise make money on, thereby increasing the value of their catalog, instead they get nothing at all.

Well the other side of the equation is what the new distributors (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) are willing to pay to stream a given property. If a property keeps jumping from service to service and in and out of availability I would guess it has more to do with a mismatch between the perceived value of the property and what the streaming services are willing to pay for it.

Artificial scarcity is a thing I can't argue with you there, Disney has been doing it for years with drip-style "anniversary" releases of their properties on media. I would fully expect them to do the same with their streaming content.

I don't even care about flat rate, charge me a couple dollars (and more if it was just out in the cinema, I don't want to go to a room full of stranger to watch a movie) per movie/show but. I'm even OK to have to use 3 different providers, but not being able to watch a movie because there is no agreement for the country I'm in is ridiculous.

What you describe has also been going on for nearly a century, at least in Europe: movie (and ordinary) theaters with a foyer (anteroom?) were people drink, smoke (in the past, but also now in some countries) and socialize before the movie starts and during the intermission (a short 10-15 minute break splitting the movie in two parts customary in some countries so you can piss in peace, have a drink or a smoke back in the day, and restock on popcorn without missing anything).

And that's for regular movie screenings -- there are also all kinds of organized screenings, where people get to talk and discuss the movie afterwards, especially for art films and such.

But already being in an audience while the movie plays, and being aware of people's reactions etc. is a shared experience (and it had been alluded as such by tons of filmmakers).

A lot of people have commented that the music solution is not ideal in a number of ways from the 'demand' side, but I don't think anybody has mentioned how the music business is broken from the 'supply' side.

It is next to impossible to make a living from music for the vast majority of musicians and producers out there. The obvious argument is that if you cant sell, your quality isn't good enough but that's actually not true in my opinion. Distribution is severely unbalanced - and if the movie industry continued in this direction, all we will ever see is Spiderman remakes.

If there were a single service that had all the content, and no one else had content, you would be pirating because the cost could go to the 100s.

The competition of content is what makes the services cheap and pumps out new quality content on different platforms. At the same time it allows for the efficent satisfaction of the demand: those that care little pay little, those that care a lot pay a lot. With a single bundle, you either get all or you get nothing.

There are many arguments to believe this is more efficient. The music industry, also, its ridden with tremendous problems, I would not model my business after them if I had the choice.

The situation is effectively also disrespectful towards the creators of movies and the whole art form. Who would happy about a movie being buried in the archives? A movie has to be watched to effectively exist.

The movie studios likely don't see it this way. Tickets and merchandising are still the two main pillars of the industry. Home viewing is still the bottom end of the market [1]. The embrace of streaming represents a loss of revenue, not a gain of consumer good will [6].

Physical media (DVD/BluRay) are much more lucrative. Studios have an incentive to keep selling a pennies-worth of plastic for $20. Streaming represents a major loss of revenue and the studios will stall and delay until consumer demand forces them to change.

People still buy millions of BluRay movies each year [2]. Now the studios are trying to compete directly with Netflix, rather than embrace the changing consumer landscape. This is largely a continuation of Blockbuster's long, slow demise [3].

In order to feed the lucrative parts of the distribution chain (movie tickets, merch, physical media), Hollywood is increasingly churning out "big" movies. This has spawned a new phenomenon called "super hero fatigue" [5]. Many are predicting the demise of blockbusters altogether in the near future [4].

But don't expect studios to change until it's proven that they can't make money the old way.

Agreed. I only pay for netflix and HBO (and amazon, but that's a bonus for paying for prime). HBO doesn't feel like "extra" because it's always been an optional add-on that costs more.

First all the "major" studios will split and start charing $10/month. Then adds will start creeping back in. Before you know it everyone will be paying for an ad-hoc cable subscription.

I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.

The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.

Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).

It's a bit depressing how similar that sounds to how cable networks work. Or platform specific app stores.

> Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).

If you actually had something like that, it could know that you watched Cosmos on Netflix and then suggest physics lecture videos from Open Courseware. It could suggest YouTube videos alongside Hollywood movies.

Which is exactly what the studios don't want, because they want you watching only their content. That is the real reason they're so obsessed with DRM -- they want creating that to be prohibited by law, because it would allow a free market for content curation instead of allowing the major studios to control it.

It's the same reason they don't like Netflix. Netflix is producing their own content and is happy to accept content from small players. It's not a fully open market but it's still too much like real competition.

But fragmentation isn't going to save them. People aren't going to subscribe to a dozen separate streaming services each with their own incompatible interface.

Hopefully they'll realize that sooner rather than later and decide that it's better to have open interfaces and protocols than let someone else (i.e. Netflix) have market power.

I think your comments about the power are largely spot on - and bigger players can make a move for their own streaming services, but smaller ones will need to band together (not necessarily via an all-in-one subscription service like Netflix, but via some sort of content platform/store/whatever).

That said, I think that the curation aspect is something that studios aren't overly concerned about - they just hate that a direct competitor is stealing their profit and making their own content. If Netflix wasn't being as aggressive (or wasn't being so damn profitable; or wasn't negotiating prices with the studios), I don't think that the content creators would be trying to run away so quickly.

I hope that open protocols win out, that's the best solution here for everyone (and would be the ideal "major marketplace" in my parent comment). That said, it may just wind up being an organisation owned by a consortium/cartel of studios (or even some other third party) that's contractually obligated to "fairness".

Has anyone had luck with canistream.it? I've never once had success with it and tried at least half a dozen times over months.

Just now I did a search for "all the presidents men." Top hit was "All The King's Men" but the right movie did show up second. It says "Not available for streaming, rental, or purchase. Click below to set reminders."

Agreed. I've probably tried using that site about 5-6 times over the past year, and it has never told me anything was streaming. Never. And yes, about half of the things I checked were indeed streaming upon further review.

That's like saying Google "just" aggregates indexed websites. I use justwatch on a weekly basis to find out whether a movie is on any of the services I use (instead of checking all three of them individually), and browse new releases on each service.

Sure. But OP was responding to the below excerpt. At least from the way I've interpreted the request, they are looking for a single interface to watch their content from multiple providers. justwatch does not do this.

px1999 1 hour ago [-]

Long term, we'll probably wind up with a couple of major marketplaces that provide a UI that ties together content bundles that you've purchased from different distributors (who will actually serve up their catalogs).

FireTV and AppleTV already do this some degree. On FireTV when you search for a movie/show it will give you options where to play it based on which apps you have installed (netflix, hulu, or via amazon/prime)

The Apple TV's "TV app" is great for this... but for some reason, it only functions in the US. I get that it has a "live cable" Single-Sign-On component that cable providers need to sign up with–but all I want from it is the unified interface for searching/browsing and watch-tracking of content within streaming services!

It's alright but clearly dependent on the content providers and platform operators to be honest and accurate. Recently I tried to watch the new season of Archer. My Fire TV told me that show is available on Netflix and Hulu but didn't seem to know which seasons. I opened Netflix first and found they had old seasons but not the latest. I switched to Hulu and the thumbnail for the show mentioned Archer Dreamland, the latest season. I opened that up and found that the latest season was not available and Hulu had the same offering as Netflix.

FXX themselves do not seem interested in my money and require that I have cable so I continue not consuming their content.

The only way the Steam model would work for media is if content owners would agree that if someone on the platform purchased a digital copy of something that the ownership couldn't be rescinded.

Nobody will purchase, for instance, all the seasons of M.A.S.H. if they know that there is a risk that the rights owners will pull their content off of the platform in a few years and the person loses the ability to watch what they paid for.

The platform should also have the ability to "import" previously purchased rights. If someone buys a TV show on iTunes, they should be able to import that purchase into the platform so they can consolidate all of their purchases into a single platform.

Lastly, the other thing that made Steam a huge success is the sales. Daily sales of some content, quarterly sales of large swaths of content, etc. That would have to occur for a media platform to have the same kind of success.

I'm an unabashed pirate because it's easy... but if I could use a platform like this that didn't have a recurring monthly cost I would use it.

If Pixar put their upcoming movie available for pre-purchase (like Steam Greenlight) at 40% off, I would likely pre-purchase it. If Disney wanted to drum up interest in their new Duck Tales reboot by putting the original series up for sale for $20, I would be all over that. A TV series in its 4th season with struggling ratings could put up a flash sale of previous seasons in order to get new viewers to binge watch before the new season starts. A TV series could also sell a season pass BEFORE the new season starts for an infusion of cash and release the episodes on the regular schedule.

A steam-like platform could work wonders for media consumption, but it'll be hard to get companies to do it.

Steam took off because it was required for an awesome video game that Valve released. Eventually Steam was more valuable than the game.

That's the only way something like this happen for media. A small studio with a hot property could build the platform for their own offerings but invite other media owners to participate. Adult Swim or SyFy or FX could probably pull it off.

Stream uses DRM, has famously bad customer service, geofilters content and uses differential pricing, keeps content it produces itself exclusively to the platform and withholds it from others, bars some content based on arbitrary criteria, maintains a singular store that doesn't play especially nice with third party indexing tools etc etc etc.

Even Valve doesn't believe in Gabe's statement, and never did. Dozens of media companies have much larger market caps than Valve's estimated value.

The statement conforms to the prejudices of a lot of Hacker News, but there is significant evidence that it's not empirically true.

So DRM, geofiltering, and differential pricing are all requested by publishers and distributors. If you want something more equitable then try GoG, but as you'll notice that not all new or big games are on that platform.

As for third party indexing tools, I read that to mean scraping the site for various reasons. Which I can understand they might not want due to the extra load it generates.

I said make it easy, steam did make it easy. It is easy to use steam to buy and play games. Maybe it's not easy to use steam to buy a game, and then play it without steam... but then that wouldn't fit into my argument.

It's hard to convince someone of something when their income depends on them believing the opposite.

Steam was successful because it combined advantages for producers and consumers with minimal changes to the business model. The old business model is people buy games that come on a CD or DVD in a small cardboard box for $30-50; the new business model is people buy games that finish downloading in a few hours for $30-50. Not really much of a change in revenue stream.

Cable TV, however, relies on splitting up the channels people want into different packages, that each come with lots of channels they don't want. They also need to overcharge you so they can afford to cut the prices for the "package deal" (TV/Phone/Internet bundles). What people want instead is more à la carte options, with a discount from package deals because they're asking for fewer channels.

So moving to a service that would cut piracy would still hurt financially. Another advantage of piracy is that they can blame their financial troubles on "filthy criminals" and use that to extract some benefits from compliant government allies. Offering a less profitable service that reduces piracy robs them of that as well.

Steam does more than that. It combines social elements (What are my friends playing now? Do they want to join me? What games do they recommend?) and lower price points as well (Summer Sale etc). I know lots of people that stopped pirating games because Steam was reliable (pirated games rarely are), took away the pain (mostly) of patching games and because if you are willing to wait, games are actually pretty cheap.

I think there's another point that is very important: Steam was the original cloud.

Back in the day where GMail was heralded as being amazing, and offering 1GB of storage for your mails, Steam came out and said "don't worry about how to install Half-Life/CS, or which patch to apply, I'm automating all of it."

"You don't need to worry about your CDs any more. I'll give you the content, for free, anytime you change PCs."

"Just log in with your Steam account on the cybercafé computer. All the games you own are already installed."

Steam was made mandatory to install the new version of CS (was it the 1.6 release?). That was Valve's best move ever (even though I hated it back in the day).

Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.

I do the same, but I think that's harder with a family. Right now my wife and I don't have time to watch much, so we usually pick a single show together and watch it start to finish, but if we both had our own watching habits or kids I don't know what we'd do. I dont imagine anyone else would have the patience to start/stop service no matter how easy it is (I can't even get them to turn off the lights when they leave the room).

People will definitely turn to piracy if it becomes too difficult/fragmented to watch the content they want to watch.

As a result, for these services to be successful, we'll probably see some renewed fighting against piracy and some work toward increasing regulation on the internet. Unfortunately, the political climate is probably pretty good in the US right now for Disney and other big content creators to start pushing for these.

Or just not watch. It's just TV. If it's too hard I'll go and do something else and not even miss it. That doesn't help the content creators long term if I'm no longer even interested in their product.

I briefly worked for a company that wanted to do this (Fanhattan/FanTV). It was more an aggregator than a marketplace, but similar concept. But that was back in 2011, so they were a bit ahead of their time (and also seemed allergic to actually shipping things, but that's unrelated, I suppose).

I'm suggesting that if you add eg "Miramax" to your library by paying their subscription you gain access to their back catalogue. I may only want one or two movies from them, but thanks to the bundling I have access to way more. Or Disney might divide subscriptions up by its studios or labels. I don't see them offering individual shows in a subscription, as that has limited appeal (has been done already and doesn't _really_ require its own platform)

Overall, it's not so different from cable channels, except that it's on-demand.

Officially there is no such service, but unofficially you can do a lot of stuff :-)

You pay $12 to Netflix and you can watch it officially on 4 devices, which means it's $3 for any of your 4 friends, but you can "oversell" it actually more if you've some friends in different timezones. Many services work this way just fine. Streamwarez(tm) is here for a long time already.

| The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms. I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is. No chance I'll add a third, forth, or fifth platform to the mix.

That's my biggest pain point as well. I already have to switch between Netflix / Hulu / Amazon to figure out who has the content I want. I've always been a huge Stargate fan; Netflix and Amazon used to have it, now only Hulu has it. Amazon is the only one that has the latest episodes for shows that I like, (although I have to pay extra, I'm willing to bite the bullet for my favorite show).

IMO, one of the biggest design goals of Apple TV is precisely exposing content on a provider-agnostic interface, to avoid this pain. As services get more and more fragmented, Apple could become more and more competitive in that space.

Using Prime and Netflix with the FireTV Stick, if I search for a movie in Amazon's interface and Netflix has it, Amazon will tell me so and provide a button to click directly to that movie in the Netflix app. Same with the Showtime app (not sure about Hulu as I don't subscribe to it currently)

> I'm already annoyed when I have to go from Netflix to Amazon to find a movie/show I want to see but can't remember where it is.

This problem was solved for me by Roku search on my roku device. It still is something I'd rather not need to do, but the search interface is just as good as the dedicated ones for amazon or netflix and shows you the results across all services.

yup. same for me. Having a search that centralizes all subscriptions you currently have really makes it easy to access that content. I remember the Wii U was supposed to have something similar, it never worked for me. The roku search on the other hand, works just fine. Even the voice search is not that bad.

People who want to watch Japanese cartoons get to pay for yet another streaming service, and for years there was a split where we had to pay for both Crunchyroll and Funimation. We finally saw light at the end of the tunnel with the advent of a partnership to share content. Only it turned out to be an Amazon freight train in the form of Anime Strike, which not only requires a $99/yr Prime account, but an additional $5/mo surcharge.

And now once again, we have a service cannibalizing half the important shows each season. And I'm just ... out. Amazon is not getting more money from me. I'm not supporting this balkanization of media content. And I will likely drop Crunchyroll because it doesn't have half of what I want to watch anymore.

These companies are never going to learn. I am happy to pay for content, but I'm not going to sign up for one streaming service per show I want to watch. Like most people, I simply can't afford that.

I buy DVDs. My data cap is too low to stream, and I can't get a higher one. (I've tried.) Netflix and whoever licensing shows for streaming only really pisses me off because then there's no way for me to watch those shows.

Do I really have to go over econ 101 with you? The past distro channels look to "not work" while there's a better alternative; once the latter have a monopoly - oh fuck it, just sit back and pay attention.

>I think a better option would be to do what Amazon is doing for HBO - offer a small portion of the studio (in this case Disney) included with the platform (Netflix) with the option to pay additional fees for the entire catalog.

Just a heads up - HBO is pulling their shows from Amazon in mid-2018[1]. They essentially view it as competition with HBO Now.

My Mi Box (Android TV) lets me search accross apps so I just usually search for movies and shows that way unless I know it's already on Netflix. The weird part for me is Disney coulda just made themselves exclusive to Hulu instead. Just means I wont be watching any Disney movies or shows ever again since I won't bother paying for just Disney or even having regular cable (no more Disney channel for me). Sadly for others it may mean torrenting because the convenience is taken away for the sake of profit.

With HBO I simply do one month subs when a season will complete during it so I can get the whole season in. Once a site passes the $10 mark I quickly lose interest and then I start determining how I can maximize my sub time.

Now what will be interesting is seeing which studios cannot float their own streaming service and combine either with another studio or group of them under an all inclusive banner. I figure we will go nearly full circle and end up with an aggregator like cable was but this time without too much junk.

my beef with some of these "premium" sites is they think that ever after they get $15 from me that I have to watch THEIR ads. Really? I paid for the shows, not 30 to 60 seconds of your ads.

I will never pay for YouTube Red. When an unskippable ad starts playing, I just look away. Most of the time, I realize that I'm wasting time watching idiotic YouTube content, and I quit the app. In this, they're actually lessening my addiction to their platform in that they're giving me a break to consider if I should keep watching or not.

I'm asking because it's been years since I saw/was forced to watch a video ad on YouTube. Sure, there are occasionally the banner ads at specific times in the videos, but no video ads.

So either the channels I watch have somehow opte out of video ads, or uBlock is taking care of them?

Or maybe this is a geographic thing and YouTube in Germany doesn't show video ads?

Anyway, if you have Android and want to watch on mobile, I highly recommend NewPipe (F-Droid). Lets you: watch, listen, download, repeat YouTube videos and I've never seen an ad in it. Really awesome app!

If you use an Amazon Fire, you can use Alexa to find titles whether they're on Prime, Netflix, or Hulu, at least, and probably others. Unfortunately the Nextflix integration is problematic if you're not in the US, because it still uses the US catalog.

> The biggest deterrent, for me at least, is not the price but the need to switch platforms.

Agree, especially when most doesn't work nearly as well as Netflix. I prefer to use the TV app and the horrible user experience I had with HBO (for instance) made me quickly stop using it.

For a streaming company user engagement should be taken very seriously, but it seems that most studio-turn-streaming-company miss this. They think content is everything because that's what a studio is about. But content doesn't matter if I can't stream it easily and many studios are so over-protective of their content that they forget about usability.

Plus Pixar and ABC (with Shonda Rhimes' shows) and every movie and show they've ever released since they stopped being a premium channel. Disney has managed to get a lock on a lot of very hot property.

If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.

Also Disney is currently in a strong position for this right now. They released ~10 movies in 2016 and had the 4 highest grossing films of 2016. This, of course, assumes that Marvel and Lucasfilm properties are put on the Disney streaming service (I would expect that Touchstone label will not be included in this, as it's always been distinctly branded).

Either way, $10 per month is a bit steep up until the point that they stop selling discs; right now it's not much more than $10 per month to buy every single new release on bluray, and it's less than $10 per month to buy them on dvd, if you shop around.

The thing that scares me is that this puts them in a position where they could stop selling media altogether, and it's no longer possible to pay a flat fee to watch a movie any time you want. At that point the only competition with the streaming service would be piracy.

Netflix already doesn't have that big of a library, and it's been steadily shrinking. But if it comes down to it, i'm willing to pay for $10/mo to netflix purely for their original content. I'd also pay for HBO Now if they would let me (I'm in canada). I don't think there's any other company putting out enough quality first-party content that i'd be willing to pay a monthly fee for their service. maybe a couple bucks here and there for a one-off movie rental, but if i have to think about money before i watch something - even a completely insignificant amount - i'm probably going to find other options.

And as you say, there's always piracy to fill the gaps in any streaming catalogue.

In 2004, my cable budget was $160/mo in a bundle. Now it is $100/mo for a half-gigabit internet connection.

I'd have to sign up for 6 different services in order to add up to my previous budget. So far... its' not come to that point, but if it does I'll be happy to cut out some services.

After all do I really need Netflix? I don't watch if for months at a time, and only keep it out of laziness. I'll happily cut it and swap in Disney for that time period of budget constraints become an issue.

> After all do I really need Netflix? I don't watch if for months at a time, and only keep it out of laziness.

I put my elderly mother on my netflix account with her own profile and she couldn't be happier. I saved her a bunch of money that she'd otherwise be spending on cable and as a bonus she's not watching 24hr news that's making her afraid all day. For something that I occasionally will use but she always uses, $10/mo is _cheap_.

Now if I could only nudge her towards some of the Korean soap operas that they have now...

Heh. My elderly father watches 100x more Netflix than I do. It makes him happy, particularly for the price. I'm glad he enjoys it, even if I also wish I could nudge him towards a wider variety of shows.

>I'd have to sign up for 6 different services in order to add up to my previous budget.

that's a good point. but for comparison, in 2004 my cable budget was zero because i was in high school and living with my parents. In college we shared hard drives full of movies around the dorms, and ever since i've lived on my own my tv/movie budget has been some combination of netflix and piracy that added up to less than $10/month. The ship may have sailed on people being willing to spend $60-100 per month on TV.

In 2017, I paid for 100/40 VDSL 30€/month and for all TV channels I could ever need 5€/month (Satellite dish and HD+ decoder card).

I'm currently paying 2€/month for Amazon Prime for Students, and I'm not willing to pay more than 10€/month overall for access to streaming platforms (as long as I'm a student, after that maybe 20-30€ overall). That simple. In my family we have Amazon Prime and Netflix, if stuff isn't on there it gets pirated, no discussion.

Never seen a pay/subscription site with an anti-adblocker. It wouldn't load until I let it connect to facebook, twitter, scorecardresearch and load a 1st party tracking script included in two tracker lists (Fanboy's and another). It was so tenacious it piqued my curiosity.

Really hard to fathom the thinking behind that. At first I thought it must be a pirate site that depended on ad revenue, but nope it's $8 / month.

MotorTrend on demand have the same, but is only a white overlay over the whole page. So it is enough to set the overlay to display none to get the site to work without allowing a bunch of tracking scripts

relative to their immediate competitors, yes they have a fairly big library. but in absolute terms, the chances that a random movie i want to watch is available on netflix is already pretty low. losing the disney catalogue isn't going to significantly change that.

my favourite movie piracy website claims to have 32 times as many movies as US netflix does.

Piracy is the only thing that will lead to a consumer friendly streaming option. If it weren't for music piracy, a service like Spotify might not exist. For video, Bit Torrent was popular for years.

Now people are flocking to things like Kodi, which can be installed on a Firestick [3] and, with add-ons, can stream anything for free [1]. In order to fight piracy, the studios will need to make it more convenient for consumers to pay [2].

We know what will happen, though: studios will spend $ on content and $ on their streaming service, and $$$ trying to stifle competition and consumer rights. If they had instead spent $$$ on content and $$ on their service, people would pirate much much less, but somehow they don't see that or can't / won't run the real numbers.

Dividing content by movie studio cuts against the grain. In most cases a single studio produces an arbitrary subset of the stuff I might want to watch. This is unlike, say, ESPN, where I can add it to my cable subscription if I like watching sports. ESPN is a semantically coherent unit of content. Disney isn't.

If the Disney move represents a trend, it's going to be particularly frustrating for end users, as there will be no legal solution for watching what we want to watch when we want to watch it, unless we subscribe to all services. Guess how many users will do that, and how many will just click the magnet link.

> If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.

Exactly! It is obvious that Netflix and Amazon are pivoting to be more like HBO and Showtime. Apparently, as they reach out to a global audience they need to rely on original content to avoid costly licensing disputes [1].

Netflix may have added 600 hours but have you plumbed what Netflix adds? Most of the content is crap. Content is not a numbers game it is a hits game.

"Star Wars is worth more than harry potter and james bond combined."[1]

Just the first 6 episodes of Star Wars is 17 hours of footage. This does not include special features, cartoons and other offshoots in this franchise.

Access to this on a whim, along with immediate access to exclusive preview-type content every year prior to the theatrical release is seriously valuable on its own.

I'd venture many people are HBO Go subscribers simply for Game of Thrones right now. And that more than enough do not bother to unsubscribe in the off season.

I think people on HN underestimate how people value content. They don't realize people pay huge sums for complete garbage cable content plans already. A commercial free experience of Disney content, particularly Star Wars / Marvel powered with exclusives priced the same as HBO or Netflix would probably do great.

Content is hits+depth. You do the 30 day trial to watch star wars, then stay on because you find other stuff you like. Unless you're going to watch a different star wars movie every week[1], you can just rent or buy the star wars movies for cheap.

1: By 2019 there should be about a dozen feature-length star wars movies, counting the 3 2-hour television specials, so you're right that just star wars movies is not that great.

Truly, I think you're underestimating what people will pay for to get exclusive content in their core interest. Star Wars film releases are rapidly becoming an annual, family tradition for movie goers.

When you can drip out production updates and use electronic marketing channels to hype them or include fan AMA type stuff, there is big potential here to keep people around.

But to your point, if you take Star Wars out of the picture, you still get the entire Disney film collection. Just about every middle class family in America in the 90s had some portion of the Disney VHS collection on their shelves.

I don't see this desire for easy access to familiar, high quality, family-friendly content going away. I see it increasing.

Star Wars is already the movies, plus two animated series (Clone Wars and Rebels). You can look at the Marvel strategy to see where it could go, with multiple movies a year plus multiple tv/streaming series (Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Legion, Defenders, Gifted, Inhumans, Punisher, Runaways). If all that Marvel content moves to Disney streaming, plus new Star Wars content, plus their kids TV shows, plus Pixar, ABC, and ESPN, then you have a package that is really strong.

Atleast 50% of the marvel content on your list are Netflix Owned Orginals, they can not pulled to Disney's new service. This would be Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Defenders, Punisher. It is highly unlikely Netflix would be stupid enough not to have those locked down.

Agents of Shield I believe a ABC owned production, and would be governed under what ever terms Netflix and ABC have, Same with Inhumans I would image but it is a newer property so it might have to stings attached it to

Movies, yes those will likely be pulled. I can see the Non-Netflix Originals being pulled.. maybe.

Based on both an article from the announcement time [1] and the wiki page [2] the Defenders are jointly produced by Marvel TV and ABC Studios, merely distributed by Netflix. If that is true[3], then Disney (which owns Marvel and ABC) owns the rights to them, and once the current contract expires Netflix will no longer be able to distribute (stream) any of the Defenders series.

That would apply to Agents of Shield as well, which is also part of the Disney family.

The various incarnations of the Disney Channel currently have 33 ongoing series and 6 upcoming series. There are hundreds of completed series. Their back-catalog will probably be smaller than netflix in 2019, but they have more new content than you would think.

> If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.

It already is a bit like that if you leave the cushy confines of the USA, where the rights to even stream some of their own Originals (e.g. Orange is the New Black, Arrested Development, Lilyhammer) have not been secured and thus us poor souls must resort to pirating or waiting, potentially for years.

To quote Netflix[0]:

> Depending on the region, Netflix may not get the licensing rights for an original series for many years.

Another thing I bet they'll do is arbitrarily pull movies from the streaming service for a period of time so people will flock to the service when they announce its return in a 2 minute commercial you can only see in the theater before their latest movies. They are the kings of artificial scarcity.

I mean no offense, but I found amusement in this post. It used to be that people hated cable bundles so much that they would say they would rather pay $10/month a channel for the few they watch rather than the $80/month for a bundle of hundreds of channels with only a few worth watching.

Now that we have that, are we living the dream? No, we want it for a tenth of the cost.

I don't think it's about paying that high a cost, I think it's about having to chase it all over the place. I'd pay double or maybe triple for Netflix, as long as it meant I could get most or all of the streaming content I wanted in one place. This is one reason why Steam is so popular.

So then your issue isn't the cost, and if someone came with an app that would "merge" all service into a single app where you can stream for all of them from a single place, you'd be happy?

I don't think that's what others are complaining about though. Price was definitely the issue of the top commenter as they mention 10$/month and 30$/year. But it makes no sense because back in the cable days, people paid 50-100$ if not more for packages. Now, even with all 4 big services, you're still only at 40$, and imo, having an ondemand service where you can stream anything you want at any time (not only that, but with most of them, with multiple people watching in parallel) is a far superior service.

I think people are just getting more entitled for content that has had billions of dollars poured into it. 10$ a month is nothing. It's literally two coffee. If you watch one episode per week and don't even share your account, you're already getting value out of it.

This is, has been, and always will be a ridiculous argument. $10/mo is nothing, it's the price of two coffees. But I need four services, so it's $40/mo, which is eight coffees. So now to afford the same content that was 1/4 of the price last month, I need to give up drinking coffee on Monday and Tuesday, every week.

"It's the price of a cup of coffee" is a terrible argument because I don't want to give up drinking coffee just to watch Disney movies. I want to drink my coffee and watch my movies like I did last month before Disney decided they needed to make more money.

You can still for relatively cheap buy shows on Amazon or Google play. Unless you watch a ton of TV it's still cheaper and you actually own it. Works for many shows except Netflix or HBO originals. For these I just only subscribed every few months, watch what I want and then unsubscribe.

Used to work in a café. It's not the coffee people are paying for, it's all the milk and sugar added on top. Unless you go to Philz*. Sometimes you're also paying for quality, but even then that only comes out to about a dollar premium, but a latte is literally just a crapton of steamed milk poured over some coffee, plus whatever syrups and other crap (chocolate and maybe whipped cream if you want a mocha) thrown in.

Then it's the labor and time you're paying for because a pour-over takes 4 minutes per cup if you do it right, and each employee can only do so many of those at one station. 4 minutes of an employee's time at minimum wage in San Francisco is almost a dollar, about 93.33¢ give or take, and that's assuming the employee is being paid minimum wage and not more.

Plus the costs of running the cafe! Plenty of HNers know how crazy Bay Area rent is. Business rent is just as much of a rip. It's $6 for a 12oz mocha because they have to pay a ton for space, taxes, labor, supplies, equipment, power, water, etc.

Actually I would say $6 for a 12oz mocha is (presently) still a rip-off. It might not just be you that's getting ripped off though, I talked to some guys who opened up a Boba joint and they were getting taken for a ride on their lease for a space they were subleasing from another restaurant, which was the main reason they went out of business. From the amount they quoted, they were probably paying the entire restaurant's lease, which is to say, some small business owners are unable to successfully negotiate a good lease.

Okay, but then you're not talking about a coffee any more. I typically pay ~$1.50 for a coffee, and it takes only a few seconds of labor (often just giving me a cup so I can fill it myself).

Edit: Missed the pour over part, yes if you want to pay and wait for that. I'm not convinced that there's any discernable difference from a regular drip coffee that would stand up to a blind taste test (cf wine tasting).

I agree, but when people are talking about coffee in general, it is important to know what they are actually referring to, in this case, coffee-based drinks. I am unaware of any establishment that would actually charge $4 for a self-serve drip coffee.

you pay $80 a month for let's say 100 channels. most people think they are paying $0.80 per channel. the cable providers know you don't want around 90 of those channels, but they're giving them to you anyway. what consumers are actually paying is $70 for their most watched channel, $5 for their 2nd most watched channel, $3 for the 3rd, $2 for their 4th, and every other channel is given to them free by the cable provider.

if cable companies were to allow consumers to pick and choose, they'd more transparently charge it like this. you could pick just 5 channels you reduce all the crap that they're giving you, and you'd probably still pay the same amount.

As far as pricing goes, steam has the benefit of games being much less excludable than media. If you want a racing game or shooter and can'tafford the biggest titles, there're always other alternatices that're cheaper. This keeps the biggest titles' pricing in check or at least anchor them around value marks people tend to like (40 or etc)

Media by contrast is very steep. Either you're at the top of your genre or you're not worth it for those looking for the former. If you want an epic fantasy story GoT still beats out other shows cropping up around the same theme (even if you think the latter have better story or so on, that's not what drives dollars). If you want space operas you're not going to settle for less than Star Wars.

These "staples" and their exclusivity create a high value proposition greedy execs can't ignore, and one that they don't worry as much will give their competition an opening.

Very true, but I'd rather spend $40 on the shows I like than $80 on the shows I like plus a crapton of garbage.

If the producers get more money out of the deal, I have no problem with that. I'd rather they be the ones getting the money.

As it is now, I buy my stuff ala carte. I do subscribe to netflix, but I've pretty much seen what I want there. Every once in a while they get someting new I want to see, but not often enough for it to be my go-to for entertainment.

So I pay per show rather than channel. My wife and I consistently pay less than cable and just get the shows we want to see.

I wasn't sure it would work out that way, but a month or so ago I asked my wife how the cost was working out (she does the finances), and it's less than cable. I can't remember how much at the moment, but less than half I think.

Personally, the part I don't like about paying multiple providers isn't the paying multiple part. It's not having a single interface to get to them.

First, consider the experience then and the experience now. Before, only a single person could watch pre-scheduled content (unless you have an extra device to record). Now, multiple people can watch any show they want in parallel.

And your way of splitting the money is silly. At the end of the day, you were paying 80$ but were only interested in a very small portion of the content. Now you're getting that same content you cared about, but for a far smaller cost.

Comcast in my area was charging me around $130 a month for HD cable with a primary box and a secondary box with a DVR. I could subscribe to 13 premium channels @10$ a month before I started paying the same amount. I don't have 13 channels I like. I could buy 6 entire seasons @$20 a piece and that lasts longer than a month.

ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, all free with an antenna I just ordered.

Would I like the same thing I had with Comcast @13$ a month? Sure, but that's not realistic. At least not yet. Cable in the US is a huge ripoff because they cornered the market through lobbying and deals with local municipalities. It's time for them to get their "come-upins." Next is internet service.

And yes, next is internet service. But the unfortunate side-effect of the cable monopolies is that they're currently the best positioned with infrastructure to reach homes with high-bandwidth connections over the same lines which previously served cable TV. I don't want to see these same companies becoming ISPs and continue shoveling the same crap in the future.

How is this "a la carte"? I don't care about channels; I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks to watch some specific movie or TV show, but "you have to sign up for a monthly subscription to some corporation's arbitrary bundle of media offerings in order to get access to the one or two things you actually want to see" is pretty much the opposite of "a la carte TV".

It's a la carte because for decades you had to buy bundles of schlock from your cable company to get the one thing you wanted (typically ESPN).

Presumably you want finer-grained a la carte, like individual shows and movies. You can get that today via iTunes but it is insanely expensive, and it doesn't really make economic sense because not enough consumers watch little enough TV for that to make sense, therefore the price remains high and companies offering it are not doing well.

Right now the market forces are pushing everyone to try to be either Netflix (streaming service become producer) or HBO (producer becoming streaming service). As the technologies commoditize this trend will continue, and consumers will just have to deal with the abominable UX that this balkanization of services creates. It'd be nice if someone could wrap a nice UX around this, whether it be a la carte or whatever, but I don't see that market forces would allow that, and least not until the balkanization gets a lot worse and rights holders get an incentive to play nice with aggregators.

When you say "market forces", it is important to understand we are operating within the confines of the completely arbitrary market dictated by copyright law. The natural market for "intellectual goods" like music, movies, and TV is very weak (which is why copyright was created in the first place).

Cable companies and centralized distributors are the natural conclusion of our copyright mechanisms. Online video has already been coalescing on Netflix and Amazon as the next-gen cable cos instead of Comcast and AT&T.

If we don't want to be stuck with the same thing over and over again, we need to change the way that we've constructed the artificial market for intellectual goods, so that subscription bundles a la cable is no longer the only feasible economic model.

I like this approach, not shying away from reexamining the fundamental problem. What do you define as a "weak market"?

Seeing as that's the problem, affording agents in the space more or better control to try and strengthen the market could be an approach - so I want to understand where/what the current weaknesses are.

The problem tends to be the pricing. The per-episode and seasonal purchase rates often seem higher than going and buying a DVD, probably due to the store taking a cut. The streaming services, or even cable TV, are much cheaper if you make a lot of use of them.

The hope always seems to be to operate like a gym, where there are people paying but almost never showing up.

If they were separate arguments, then album sales wouldn't have dropped after iTunes started selling $0.99 a song. CD Singles have been around forever but everyone paid the extra couple dollars to get the rest of the album even though in many cases very little effort was made producing the rest of the album.

To clarify, I don't mean that the delivery options won't have an impact on price. People often seem to frame the arguments around videos services as them not providing the unit of content they want (like marssaxman above), when more often than not they do. The real complaint is usually just what your saying, they don't offer it at the desired price, despite a ton of unbundling from the old model. That's a fair critique to make, although I'm hopeful the market is able to sort it out

That may be true for traditional TV. Game of Thrones is currently airing season 7. Unless you subscribe to HBO you can only get season 6. Season 5 of House of Cards was released in May and still only available through Netflix.

Pretty much what I would do. Netflix has such a large catalog, that I don't bother cancelling during periods when I'm not even using the service. If the content I'm interested in is spread through various services, I'll simply sign up, watch what I wanted to watch, then cancel. One month's subscription is enough for me to catch up on a season's worth of some series I like.

This however creates the incentive for providers to start enforcing long term contracts for the regular price, or a much higher price for a monthly plan, in which case DVDs will be relevant again for me.

It's not quite a la carte. We've gone from 1 provider, with bundles to N providers. I don't mind paying for each content provider. What I personally mind is the content being spread across a bunch of different sites.

I don't want to have an HBO account, and a Disney account, and a Hulu account, and a Netflix account, and an Amazon account, etc etc. I wish they'd play nicely and let one provider bill me, and take care of restricting my access to their HBO portion of their library unless I pay an addition $X/month.

Yes. I think a lot of people commenting here are mid-20s adults without children who devour Disney content. I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription for access to all Disney content. Currently Netflix is already missing so many Disney titles that you already need to use something besides Netflix to watch Disney content, so this isn't actually adding a new service for core Disney viewers.

Disney already artificially creates scarcity with the physical supply of their movies; I doubt they would provide the entire catalog online when I can neither buy some physically nor watch it on Disney Movies Anywhere.

As a parent, I would do this too. Imagine if they includes Studio Ghibli movies.

There's a certain standard for Disney movie that makes it easier for you to watch or recommend young kids to watch, comparing to Netflix that you might have to weed out content a bit. Sort of similar to Whole Foods vs Safeway. This doesn't imply which one is better than the other, just that it's easier to set expectations for something with more niche.

How long would it take you to break even with installing Plex, buying the worthwhile Disney movies on DVD, and ripping them at $20/mo? 2 years? They have the same problem with ESPN. I want 15-30 minutes a day of MLB scores and highlights and don't want to pay $30/mo for it, even if it includes a channel for every college sport, the ESPPies, and original programming.

Which is why the internet in its current form is such a wonderful thing that needs to be protected as part of the common heritage of mankind. It's the closest thing we'll ever get to a living memory.

In a capitalist system piracy is seen as "illegal", but in a culture with better ways to support and fund their arts it'd be the pinnacle of immutability and access. Instead of wasting all this energy figuring out how to charge through the nose for huge undertakings after they are created to recoup costs and make future efforts seem lucrative and a "worthwhile investment" we could just create and fund what we want to see and have it be accessible to everyone (almost like a public good? Definitely an artifact of a nation's culture and works) and go along with information flow rather than stifle it.

Or maybe capitalism will grind on, and in 200 years Disney will still be kicking their Mickey copyright can down the road and rebranding their 'vault' the Disney Time Machine, making the biggest lens through cultural history toy glasses with mouse ears on them. shudders

Offline playback would be the killer feature for parents for long road trips and flights. Won't need to buy Bluray + digital copy of Disney movies if you can even find them for older releases like "Little Mermaid".

That's 12 blu-rays a year. Do your kids really watch THAT much Disney? You could buy every new Disney movie each year and have extra slots to fill out the backlog for that price, plus de-facto ownership of the data.

The size of Disney's catalogue may be underestimated by some. Having instant access to all their movies[1] and television shows[2] has quite a bit of value, and would consist of hundreds upon hundreds of blu-rays. I am not one who would sign up, but certainly if I had children I would much rather have streaming access to all of this than stacks of discs.

I am assuming a catalog "filled" with live action Disney films would mostly have those one-off concept movies they created for their channel than pages upon pages of movies standing peer to Pirates of the Carribean.

Still interesting enough to kids but let's not pretend like it's not padding; those movies were often very formulaic, "relatable kid with a weird life or circumstances goes on a journey" - not really worth the price tag for a subscription.

I feel similarly. The success of HBO Now has been a challenge because it holds out the hope that if you are "good enough" you too can get $10 - $15 a month per subscriber. This is easily 10x the revenue share from a cable bundle deal according to NAB publications.

But does anyone think I'll pay $10 per month per 'network' for entertainment? It would rapidly cost more than cable or satellite.

What I find curious is how difficult it appears to be to sell advertising on streaming channels. If you've streamed one of the 'minor' brands like SyFy or Discovery you can see a 2 minute commercial break with three identical 30 second commercials back to back.

It is hard to imagine that the people who put these things together are so clueless in terms of how their product is perceived.

HBO is in an interesting place. I actually did sign up just to watch Game of Thrones, and also to finally watch Westworld and maybe they're betting that they have enough for people to watch to actually continue their subscriptions. I mean, I decided to keep the service for about 3 or 4 months including the 2 that it'll take for Game of Thrones to finish up, but there's not denying that HBO actually does have quite a catalog.

That said, after 4 months, I doubt there will be much to interest me anymore, and even if there were, I could always just watch it next year when the next season of Game of Thrones comes out.

That said, if they offered $60/year, I would probably keep it around for a few years rather than paying between $20-$40 once a year.

Agreed. For around £8/month I would probably get Disney's streaming service but only if it actually has all of Disney's content available to watch. If they do something stupid like only 5 Disney classics at a time then sorry but they can fuck off.

There is a lot more to it than the monthly rate. There are also those terms of service.

To give you an example of what I mean: Netflix lets me subscribe and unsubscribe at whim. If they looked at my profile, they would also understand that changing that would result im my abandoing them altogether. I watch a low volume for a while, my viewing drops off for a while, then I unsubscribe for a while. Keeping track of the terms that allow me to do this is easy because it is one company. Now imagine that there were multiple companies that I subscribed to. Keeping track of those terms of service would change from an inconvenience to a pain. Seeming as most of them are traditional media companies, I also have far less trust in them. Adding 'activation fees', 'deactivation fees', and 'annual contracts' is in their blood. My apologies for the paranoia, but I have dealt with unilaterally changing agreements before.

My response to them would be: thanks but no thanks. Their services/content are not important enough for me to deal with the headache of entering into an agreement with each studio.

This. And I also don't want to switch between various different and poorly designed UI's to navigate from the content of one provider to that of another. This problem needs to be solved, fast. We were promised a steaming tv revolution but I enjoy flipping channels and keeping track of broadcast times more than switching apps.

I should have clarified: there's no sampling bias. These are incredibly popular movies. Here are some movies not on Netflix streaming that I've wanted to watch this year: Gladiator. Star Wars IV. Shawshank Redemption. The Wizard of Oz. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. All Star Trek movies. Goodfellas. Lord of the Rings. Gone with the Wind. All Godfather movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Airplane. American Graffiti. The Usual Suspects. All Jim Carrey movies except a bad one (the Grinch) and one I've never heard of (the Number 23). Toy Story. There's Something About Mary. All Austin Powers movies.

The last time I tried searching for a good movie to watch on Netflix streaming, I gave up after 10 minutes. I'd think of one movie after another after another. Nothing was there. All it could suggest was "related titles," as if that's what I would want.

>I could see a family buying a plethora of bundles, but I strongly suspect it will continue to be cheaper than the equivalent cable package.

You may be right but I just don't think the industry can go from taking in $50-100/mo to $10/mo - they will figure out a way. And people didn't mind paying that amount. What people disliked was the forced bundles and less flexibility compared to what pirating gave you.

>I can't speak at all for sports; i imagine that alone could be hundreds a month to watch a local game.

NBA is about $200/season - which isn't bad given that's for every game. When local telecoms that bought rights for local games wise up it won't even be that much.

Every studio... nah. But they don't care about being available to everyone, just the people that would choose them above another studio in the family budget.

You'll end up with people who subscribe to Amazon + Disney, or Amazon + Netflix, and some who do HBO + Disney + Hulu.

Studios want to compete with one another directly for customers, not go through some middleman.

Is it less convenient, sure, but customers (like me) used to go out to video stores and physically purchase DVDs, so its obvious what we're willing to accept a whole lot more inconvenience than what Netflix offers.

Isn't it so sad that the rich capitalists response to greater convenience is "well now we have breathing room to make things much worse, they sucked in comparison before, let's see if we can make it as horrible as that again".

That only holds if the content providers decide to continue providing Netflix with an attractive catalog. Netflix is the streaming equivalent of Comcast, it's not an attractive model to me. I would much rather I subscribed to the content separately from the display of that content. My Fire TV or Apple TV or whatever device should just show any content that I subscribe to (with all the benefits of a unified library) and I will pay the creators directly for access.

Most people pay north of $100/mo for cable TV [1]. Depending on your bundle you may pay as high as $150 (anecdotal from friends who have Comcast). If you pay $50/mo for your internet connection you could afford 5 or so $10/mo services on the same budget.

Arguably, right now Comcast Xfinity has the most/best streamable content if you pay for HBO. This will likely change soon; this has been a long time coming. Cord-cutting is increasingly popular [2] and the studios are adapting.

Disney is gambling that they own enough content to make your top 5 list of streaming subscriptions.

It is worth noting though that those figures are American, but Netflix and the Disney decision are global. The US is a bit of an outlier in terms of both the cost and popularity of cable TV. For example in Australia, a country very similar to the US in terms of pop culture and entertainment, only around 25% of homes have cable TV and the most popular package is US$39. In the US the cost can be looked at as '5 services to replace cable TV' but in most countries it does instead look like broadcast-TV content being moved behind new paywalls, with increasing costs to watch the same shows.

I've been wanting to build a PC to host my home media, and I wonder if there would be a market for a device like this:

I'd like to have a small computer where I can insert a DVD and press one button and walk away (and latter remove the disk), and then the movie is available to stream from my small media computer to my home network. It could look up the right metadata online, or you might pay a very small amount for a service that maintains accurate metadata.

For as much as I watch TV I could probably buy the few shows I'm interested in on DVD for cheaper than what I pay for Netflix. Until I get a media server like I described though, it's just more convenient to pay for Netflix.

I suspect that no such products exist because copying the DVDs would almost certainly get the creators of the device sued into oblivion.

You could also just buy* seasons on Amazon/iTunes/Google/whatever of only the shows you want and stream them to the store app on whatever devices you have. If you're only interested in a few shows a year than that gets you potentially price-competitive with Netflix+whatever else, and you don't have to worry about when Netflix loses the rights.

* the common complaint here is DRM, long-term-ownership compared to DVD, but the flip side is much better resolution than DVD and if the competition is streaming services, it puts you in much more control than that.

My problem is where to buy them to ensure 1) that I can access them for a long time, and 2) that I can access them on any device I need to. If the iPhone starts sucking and I switch to Android, can I watch my iTunes purchases there or did I just lose all that money? Can I shop the Google Play video store and stream on my iPad? Will Microsoft pull another PlaysForSure and invalidate all of my purchases at some random point?

Right now I'm buying from Amazon because even though they have the worst UI, they're the most vendor-neutral.

You pretty much need something other then a PC due to DRM. For example google movies will not give you 5.1 audio or 1080p on a PC but will on the Chromecast. An xbox one S will play most things, but not google content. Functionality may be restricted by country.

DVDs are only 480p, you really need something higher quality on a new TV. I have noticed that HBO streaming looks better to me then cable.

I can't imagine it was anything other than Disney looking at the numbers and saying "we're generating this revenue for the streaming companies, but only taking this much in profit; if we run or own distribution we can overcharge more, give shorter rentals, block content when we want to push things in other distribution channels .. and the only cost will be more money for the customer paying for redundant distribution means, more money from the customer to pay for our increased profit, and more inconvenience".

I imagine at that point the meeting chairman said "fuck the customers, show me the money" whilst chugging a glass of bolli and sucking on a fat cigar.

in the end "cord cutting" is going to be paying the same price as before for cable, but only getting internet, plus paying ala-carte licensing fees that are higher than what the content companies previously charge on cable because now they are selling to individuals instead of a collective.

already cable companies and fios price internet so that you pay only a little more for a full cable package. even if you drop cable you still have to pay extra to subsidize it.

Isn’t this kind of what we all wanted? Split up the monolithic cable package?

The idea of getting almost everything we could ever want through one $10 a month subscription with Netflix is almost too good to be true, I would expect in the long term the average person will end up paying about the same as they used to with a cable bill, ideally spread among multiple providers.

The funny thing is, I don't think executives think this way. One example is Bezos where he says he imagines theres enough demand that people will subscribe to netflix and prime and hulu and hbo and ...

Disney is the one studio with the brand recognition, loyalty, wide customer base across a variety of demographics, worldwide range, wide variety of content (including sports), and essential franchises to have a shot at pulling this off.

I think Netflix have been very smart for producing their own original content for the past few years. While losing Disney and maybe others is a blow, it doesn't leave a void in their library for quality content.

Fortunately there is enough competition in the space that maybe the prices for each channel will go down. I've already switched to watching free content on youtube for my primary source of video entertainment.

> I can't imagine that a lot of people want to spend the collective hundreds of dollars to sign up for all the streaming services.

Don't you like to have many options to choose from? You don't "have to" sign up for all of them, it's your choice.

> It's almost asking to drive people to torrents.

I am a Netflix subscriber but there are a couple of shows that I watch and are on competing streaming services, however I didn't want to subscribe to all of them. So I rented them on Google Play and/or iTunes.

I know it sounds incredible but there are ways to consume content without breaking the law.

Some kind of surprising comments in this thread. I think many people (obviously not everyone here judging by what I'm reading) would happily pay for a Disney-only service, maybe upwards of $20-$30 per month. Why? Its the mecca for family entertainment. They have Pixar, Disney Animation, Star Wars and Marvel, plus all of their Disney television content from years past. Its a quality brand people trust. Much different than Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal or any of the other major studios. Netflix and Amazon are still establishing their video content brands and I know they don't come close to Disney's reputation for family content.

Its a very logical move from my viewpoint (I don't even have a family). If other studios follow suit they will likely perish from lack of brand loyalty and/or poor execution.

I hear everyone on the desire for convergence. But we don't want convergence without competition. The problem with a Spotify model for video content is that if Netflix becomes the de facto video provider and Amazon or some other provider can't capture a sizable portion of the market, then we don't have room for other competitors.

The current model for movie theaters is one born out of anti-trust lawsuits. Its not a perfect model, but it allows for some competition on things beyond just the movie you are watching. Theaters compete on ticket prices, food options, seating and convenience (by offering multiple films). This would be a suitable model for convergence, but unfortunately it also means legislation to get providers there. And does it apply to the numerous self-starts on youtube or elsewhere? I'm digressing, but my point is that I'd rather not have just one service to rule them all.

Right, and people on here also seem to forget that they own ESPN. There are seemingly endless ways that Disney could package their content in ways that it would appeal to customers in every segment.

Sell ESPN with SEC Network, ESPN 2, and all of its networks as a standalone service to sports fans who don't care about the rest of Disney's offerings.

Sell Disney's older catalog plus kids shows on demand for people who don't care about sports but have kids.

Sell a package with everything for people who fall into both camps for a discount.

This still leaves their existing movie business completely in tact.

I honestly think this is a great move on Disney's part. Netflix needs Disney more than Disney needs Netflix. Disney owns the most valuable content portfolio in existence. Netflix has a large customer base and a growing library of its own content, but at the end of the day people shop for cable/streaming packages based on whether ESPN/ABC/Disney is included.

I think this ESPN story is overblown. ESPN is itself printing money, it's just been in decline because of cord-cutting.

But that's just recent history. Everyone can see that the cable tv industry is going to be replaced by streaming. When that happens, content owners like Disney will be able to sell directly to the consumer without the middleman. I actually think ESPN viewership will increase as more people are liberated to sign up for just ESPN and not NBCSN, Fox Sports Regional, and every other sports channel you're forced to pay for with cable.

Most apps are published to both iTunes and Google Play. Most songs to Goole Music, Spotify, Apple Music and probably a few others.

As long as it's within 10yrs old, even most games are available for purchase, anywhere in the world, from the different platforms. While the majority is exclusive to Steam, other providers have their own niche markets.

When I make an IP, I want to capture as much of the market as possible, anything else is throwing money away.

The anti-trust comes from the environment where three or four media companies own all of the production and redistribution and each one believes that they can become a monopoly and get all of the money.

I agree with this. Most families in the western world would pay upwards of $30 to be able to show Disneys back catalog to their kids. Unlimited nostalgia. But I hope they don't pull a typical Disney and portion out their content by arbitrary restrictions. Families will pay either way regardless though.

Hi, family with 4 kids, very happy to see Vaiana come on Netflix the other week. No way in hell will we pay an extra subscription just to watch old Disney films. I want one streaming service and will pay more for more (I upgraded our Netflix to support more devices). I will not pay for multiple services like this.

This exactly. When Disney has nothing on Netflix, people will miss it. It is a risky move however, as Netflix is sure to launch shows targeted to the Disney demographic very shortly after Disney leaves, and they are a force to be reckoned with.

I have nothing to add to this except that the kids I know love to watch the same movies over and over again to the point of speaking the lines with the movies. I don't get it but I'm not the target audience.

Yes, it's what I would do and agree, but I might do a lot of things to maximize the value of my dollars where other people may value convenience over the dollars. In this situation the question is will the average family person going to carry a bunch of media for multiple children in multiple vehicles? My anecdotal experience this last week traveling is families of all income will use streaming over both carrying a portable DVD player or ripped DVDs on a portable device.

There was a whole industry for production of the cassettes, warehousing, distribution, retail space, service personnel which all cost a pretty packet. The cost now of putting the post-edit file on a server with a web payment has gotta be virtually zero. Any schmuck can serve a torrent to the world for the price of an internet connection -- sure, that's the baseline, and it relies on others paying the (small) real costs, but still.

Without the need for Blockbuster retail stores, that's got to cut the price in half. Being able to keep your whole back catalog in a computer rack instead of buying warehouse space in 50 different countries has to halve the costs again, surely. Account for actual material costs, factories to make the cassettes, write them, produce the cases. What are we down to now ...

Why is Disney content so important to you, do you think watching a specific brand of movie/show is _that_ enriching to your child's life?

Disney's attitude to selling to children is toxic IMO. But perhaps if you fully inhale you actually do start to get happier by just buying the latest movie franchise tie-in toy, made of cheap plastic using exploited labour?

I'll make an argument that has nothing to do with the quality of disney's entertainment or disney's ability to give value to your child in the form of happiness/lessons.

Being a human being is a social experience. If all of a kid's friends watch disney movies and have disney toys, there is an opportunity to connect with his friends. There is also the opportunity to feel excluded, to miss out on experiences and discussions with his friends. I remember quite fondly how excited me and my friends would get talking and arguing about Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the sandbox.

Absolutely. And with some data suggesting that a very significant part of youtube playtime is through small children on their mothers' accounts, such content availability will have strong ripple effects.

my kids dont even watch that much tv, but if it was only the entire disney movie lineup - including new releases and old releases - but not including star wars or marvel or any tv shows, id pay $10/month without blinking. at $15 id still probably do it.

edit to add: not having to handle media is a big deal - dvds get scratched _very_ easily - plus being able to access the content on an old iphone or ipad wherever you are is worth its weight in gold.

They don't need to see these movies every week for their development, and you're the parent, it's your decision to make. I'm really flabbergasted at how much every parent seem to value disney movies here (not only your comment), I (naively ?) thought that the people who read Hacker News were more anti-TV than this.

Someone more clever than me could graph out the intersection of cost, convenience and the average consumer's willingness to pirate content for digital media.

I expect moving all Disney's non-live-sports content off the world's most popular streaming platform and on to an exclusive platform with its own monthly fee is going to push a lot of consumers over that line.

We're looking at a future where you have to purchase access to content and delivery of that content piecewise. Prices will definitely increase largely for the same content and convenience. And at some point society's probably going to crack down on piracy as though it were a logical extension of hacking.

I'm not sure, I see there are a lot of people who would pick the file sharing side over copyright enforcement according to their moral compass. The piracy is theft argument does not really fly (like the adblocking is theft) despite suits can threaten people over it.

From the producers pov fencing off is inherently harmful to their garden's brand/reach/discoverability battling for consumer attention.

Maybe one day we'll get to the point where the content is mostly commoditized, and we'll simple be paying for whichever aggregating service provides the best usability (such as searching, recommendation, shared watching with remote friends, etc) will be leading instead. I don't think it will be anytime soon though.

One big difference is the production costs. Much cheaper to procedure two hour record that a block buster movie. And people are happy to consume the same music content over and over again. With movies and series most people won't do that.

I just subscribed to HBO through Amazon for this reason. It's really great. Amazon user experience and streaming capabilities seem better than HBO. But HBO is the only place you can get Game of Thrones. Win-win :)

I think Kodi has a decent shot at getting there - there is now a fledgling Netflix plugin. A big step towards providing content to the major streaming services (and local content) through a customisable UI.

Spotify also doesn't pay the artists enough for most of them to survive. Studios know this. They know that $10/month isn't enough to support the creation of all the original content that has been supported in the past by $100/month.

I have a hunch that studios will find a way to pocket about the same amount of money that Spotify already does. Just based on the reports of how they treat non-superstar artists already with hollywood acounting [0].

They want more money for the studio to survive, not artists. Artists are probably "a dime a dozen", and possible to manufacture from a studios perspective.

But there is piracy version for streaming content. In CIS region there is an app for android(incl. TV) that allow You to watch literally any tv/show/movie/animation. Quality is shitty sometimes, but free is free

What about the engineering of Netflix? I see lots of comments here about pricing and how content distribution in Hollywood is messed, etc. If Disney has acquired a streaming facility, how will they compare to how Netflix is engineered?

Will they have apps, sub-accounts, lists of favorites, and be able to move from device to device and pick up where you left off?

I have to guess that Disney's depth of content is pretty shallow. You have kid movies, older Disney content, and then franchises they bought like Star Wars and Marvel. But those account for a handful of movies a piece. Maybe it won't be hard to technically serve that content up since it is much smaller than Netflix' library.

What about content delivery? The technical part of this is probably a very hard problem to solve, globally, where people's streams aren't interrupted or dropping frames, etc.

Just small things like when I fast forward, Netflix shows thumbnails of the content, will Disney have those small quality-of-life types of features?

I think it's safe to say you're underestimating Disney, they don't just knock out a kids film every year or so - they invest heavily in R&D and are pioneering many tech fields, animation, haptic feedback etc.

I understand they know how to do tech. Magic bands and their backend systems only really have to handle the number of visitors at their parks and hotels. I think that is much smaller scale than engineering something to provide streaming on-demand movies to the globe (which should be their goal). For their original content, they won't have licensing restrictions like Netflix does so the only thing holding them back would likely be tech.

Also from the article, they aren't doing the tech. They bought stake in a company that does MLB and ESPN streaming.

Netflix's original business model was to ship DVDs in the mail which was great because they did not need any special deal with Hollywood to do it. In the meantime they built a strong brand.

After the first pivot, they streamed online, which required writing deals with the studios. Back then they were happy enough that somebody was paying them more money that they gave Netflix easy terms, in particular letting Netflix keep usage analytics so as to keep the studios in as much of the dark as possible as to what value Netflix got from it.

Pivot 2 was producing their own content. Any contract they are likely to get for studios is going to be on a per subscription basis, but if they produce their own content, the cost is constant but the value goes up as you add subs.

Owning their own IP scales better as they get bigger, and also as they've gotten bigger, studios are striking harder bargains. Thus the Netflix catalog has been shrinking. The real "Netflix optimization problem" is about buying a catalog of economical content then presenting it to users in a way that they feel they get enough value to pay for the subscription.

Disney is completely right to go direct to consumer because of the strength of the Disney and ESPN brands. The cable business will be eroded, but many sports fans are fanatics and will spend a lot for content if they want it. (Think of the market for AAA video games.)

Similarly, cable is not that enteraining to children, so many parents get Netflix for their kids, a package of Disney content without the crap you find on cable could be a hit.

The day that it was clear that streaming was netflix's future, I said they were going to go out of business because there was nothing stopping the content owners from buying white-label streaming services (or just building their own in-house).

2 or 3 years later they started developing original content, which can save them, but will be a race against time (will they have a sufficiently compelling original portfolio to justify a high enough subscription to continue to develop new content before all the major studios pull their content).

I don't want to stream, which puts me in the minority. I want services similar to GOG.com or Steam. I want to buy something digitally, have it stored remotely, but allow me to pull it down locally and have it so I can take it elsewhere if I want. That way old, unpopular or niche media can exist on the platform forever and I get my content on my devices when I want it. No fancy monthly subscription with a subset of content, I'll buy each piece of content and pay full price for it.

I realize this is not the 'vision' Hollywood has for their media and most people just want to stream content and not own it anyway, but all of this is very anti-consumer.

With this, Disney is adding incovenience and introducing extra costs at the same time. Not very attractive for most people.

It will also be hard for them to create the ecosystem Netflix has (integrated in lots of TV's and other hardware, dedicated remote buttons and support in a lot of countries). The people outside the US don't care for FOX or ESPN. Maybe if FOX acquired the football (soccer) rights in all countries where Netflix is active and added that to the package or something, that would make it a bit more attractive.

Wouldn't it be better if Disney bought Netflix. Sure it's a much more expensive move, but consider their large (and pretty loyal) customer base, content library, data insights on what people want to watch, award winning movie and series strategy, etc. Disney could populate Netflix with more content of their own, own all the revenue, while still providing users with a vast variety of content. Netflix brought all the content together in an awesome and simple experience. Large co's are smelling dollars so they start to build their own Netflix clone with their own content. Customers don't want to pay for 20 different subscriptions. Give us 1 simple app, with all the content, and we'd probably pay a lot more for it.

Disney is obviously thinking they have the winning strategy with their large license database. They'll obviously lure people in with Star Wars exclusive content, Pixar, etc. But if they'd go the extra mile of buying Netflix, and giving us 1 subscription 'to rule them all', they'll prove their care for their customers.

The market cap of Netflix is 78 billion USD at the time of this writing. On top of that, they'd have to pay a premium. I suspect that you were thinking Netflix was an order of magnitude or two smaller than that.

> CEO Bob Iger told CNBC's Julia Boorstin Disney had a "good relationship" with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar's titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain.

Everyone realizes that content is king, which is why Amazon and Netflix are busy making their own content. Disney already has the content. This is them building the distribution network. People complaining about how this will lead to each studio having their own service, are missing that this is where things are going anyway, just with Netflix and Amazon playing the role of studio.

This isn't really out of character for Disney anyway. They really like vertical integration (they own their own film distributor, for example).

It seems crazy that BAMTech grew out of MLBAM - no one would ever have predicted that Major League Baseball would end up being the starting point for one of the biggest companies in online video streaming.

If you've ever tried the NFL's streaming service ... it usually works, but rarely without regularly dropping down to miniscule, unwatchable bitrates.

Games regularly fail to load with the message "This game is not-yet available, check bat at time X" where X is several hours in the past. Complaining on twitter usually gets someone to fix those issues though (whatever you do don't try going through the "support" link, you'll get a response something like 2 days later).

I think this is a terrible idea, but time will tell. As a former Hulu employee, I can say that the media rights business is a mess. It took us (and Netflix) a very long time to convince media companies that the future is streaming. Now that they understand that, it's natural that they want to control all the revenue streams for their content.

What they fail to understand is that online streaming is not easy. Netflix and Hulu have invested a lot of resources into their tech stacks. Also, have you tried building an app that works on all the different streaming devices out there? It's annoyingly difficult. You have to do all that, keep up with the latest technologies (e.g. 4K), and still provide unique features and value. Storing the content is the easiest part.

Point is, media companies should stick to what they do best and let the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon do what they do best.

I saw that and I can't speak for HBO Now, but my experience with WatchESPN (which apparently also streams through BAMTech) has been abysmal. This may be incredibly naive of me, but I'd much rather have an independent tech powerhouse like Netflix focused on content delivery.

In my experience, traditional media companies stifle innovation instead of encourage it. It was never easy to work with them and they held us back. The whole industry is a mess. I can't imagine Disney buying a controlling stake in BAMTech will make things better.

That being said, Disney is better with technology than most other media companies. Of course, I could be completely off-base here. It's just my opinion.

Piracy shifted power towards consumers. If content creators were going to see any money, they needed to offer consumer-friendly services that were better than piracy. The orgs that did this (Steam, Spotify, Netflix) dominated their markets.

As the web becomes more controlled, regulated and tracked, this power shifts back to the hands of the content creators. If there's no (legal or illegal) alternative people will go back to paying $120/mo for tv+movies. Mass media is how people bond, relate to others and fit in; and that's worth a lot. The studios know how valuable the culture they generate is, but over the past few years have been unable to successfully control their consumers.

I think that we'll see more studios shifting over to their own platforms. We'll also probably start to see renewed anti-piracy enforcement.

Because that's what the streaming ecosystem needs; more fragmentation.

I understand production companies wanting to have control over the distribution of their content, but consumers are not going to want to signup and pay for multiple streaming services.

Are there any companies out there working on a solution where they can 'buy' subscriptions in bulk from all the various streaming services, package them all under a single streaming product, and sell that to the consumer?

ESPN content but not the main ESPN channels. You can stream those, but only if you pay for a cable subscription.

It's more like they opened up access to ESPN3 and added a streamable back catalog of programming. It stems the tide of their massive losses due to cord-cutting while also allowing them to charge sports fans even more money.

"They" are going to eventually realize that one of the primary draws and reasons for the early success of Netflix was the single-source-access to (at the time) pretty much everything.

Nobody wants to maintain a dozen different accounts with a dozen different services who have a dozen different content catalogs with a dozen different payments and have to bounce between them all to find what they want to watch.

It's much easier to just pirate or pick a different form of entertainment at that point.

I wish there was a sort of white label service for streaming content. One middleman that negotiates with the content owners and then exposes an API to deliver the content on a pay-per-stream basis or something like that. I know it's unrealistic, but I want my choice between Netflix and Hulu or between Spotify and Google Play Music to be about the features and UX, not who has what content. Though this problem doesn't seem to be as significant when it comes to music for some reason.

Exclusive content makes sense from a business perspective. Hence Netflix pouring money into creating its own shows to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix[1], but as a consumer, I think I'd prefer a world in which they could still do that, license it through the middleman, and make profit regardless of where it is actually streamed.

Having an API for content could also be awesome for prospective startups, since it would allow any developer to just pay for access rather than having to figure out how to negotiate a licensing deal.

I feel like piracy is going to continue to be an issue until we get a spotify/tidal/apple music-type service for video content. Netflix seemed a lot closer to that several years ago, but it feels like we're moving backwards.

Netflix is so cheap compared to cable, though. I wouldn't mind paying for a few streaming bundles as long as the coverage is wide enough.

I don't know if the industry will move towards consolidation like we've seen in music streaming services, but if prices stay similar to cable but I can watch whatever I want whenever I want, I'd consider that a win.

EDIT: my point doesn't refute that piracy will continue, just that more streaming services isn't too large a regression

I've never quite gotten why Chromecast is this Rubicon for them. Kindle content is available on pretty much anything that you'd expect, and even Amazon Video itself has officially been on Android for quite some time.

I can't imagine it's some play to increase the all-important value of the Fire Stick, so what's the deal?

Personally, I don't feel like paying for multiple subscription services, and I suspect I'm not alone. Cable still enables me with options, and includes ESPN and Disney Channel. Sadly, this means I still cannot "cut the cord".

Considering that distribution in future is all going to be digital, this makes sense at many levels for Disney.

If you see the changing landscape, other big studios already have distribution (NBC has Comcast, Time Warner is trying to merge with AT&T). Viacom, CBS and Fox will all make some moves soon. I expect traditional TV to fully transition to digital ecosystems by 2020 as publishing & music did before.

The competition for a user's time and attention watching video now cuts across verticals from the likes of NYT/WSJ/WaPo to Vox/AOL/Yahoo to Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram to Youtube/Netflix/Hulu to streaming services from TV Networks & Cable Companies. There will be a lot of consolidation in the process.

One can dream, but as a consumer I just want all streaming content in a single place.

I really wouldn't mind paying extra to see HBO, Disney, Amazon, etc, in Netflix. Paying different providers with varying user experiences and figuring out where each content is or if I can install a certain app in my device is a pita.

For example I live in Mexico and for some reason there is no HBO Go for Android TV. The app exists for regular Android in LATM, but not for Android TV. Plus they can't handle the volume when a new Game of Thrones episode is out.

In Google Play Movies dubbed films and original audio ones are actually different movies in their DB. What's worse, many movies are only available dubbed.

I don't know about the US, but in my experience Netflix is the only company doing it right.

I think some of the comments here are ignoring that with their own distribution platform comes their own distinct user experience. As part of Netflix, Disney could never experiment with content - they are restrained to the UX designed to suit the lowest common denominator between movies/tv etc. Disney invests highly in R&D all over the place - imagine if they did that here with a streaming platform AND the children of the world's favourite content.

Weather they do decide to innovate on the classical stream-a-movie-file-to-users type system remains to be seen... But they certainly have a unique opportunity here.

Veterans Day is an authority United States open occasion, watched every year on November 11, that distinctions military veterans; that is, people who served in the United States Armed Forces. It agrees with different occasions, including Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, celebrated in different nations that check the commemoration of the finish of World War I; significant dangers of World War I were formally finished at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, when the Armistice with Germany became effective. The United States beforehand watched Armistice Day. The U.S. occasion was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.

Veterans Day is not to be mistaken for Memorial Day, a U.S. open occasion in May; Veterans Day praises the administration of all U.S. military veterans, while Memorial Day respects the individuals who passed on while in military service.It is additionally not to be mistaken for Armed Forces Day, a minor U.S. recognition that additionally happens in May, which particularly respects those as of now serving in the U.S. military.

I think title could be more clear. Disney bought a majority stake in bamtech aka MLB advanced media aka MLB baseball streaming arm. They also happen to stream HBO, WWE, and NHL. I wonder what will happen to those relationships.

Bleh, every media company implementing their own shitty ecosystem is such a waste. As is usually the case, they'll probably end up doing a poor job for the first few years. A media company's core competency is their content! To give an example: despite there being tons of amazing and highly customizable video players players available on every platform, they'll push you towards using their poorly designed one-size-fits-all player. Same thing applies to content exploration, ratings, reviews, suggestions, etc.

I'd love to see an open platform for ratings, reviews, and suggestions. There's no sense in repeatedly creating isolated islands of data.

Content exploration usually sucks too. Sometimes you wanna slice data in ten different ways! Instead of implementing a mediocre searching and filtering system, just make the full catalogue's data and metadata available as a downloadable snapshot. Most content catalogues are typically pretty small, and if the data is openly available, I can just write my own one-off query. Heck, if you have all the info and metadata available, you can write some really interesting queries without having to worry about performance.

Over the last few years I've gradually lost interest in most TV and movies. I'll go to the cinema on the rare occasion something catches my eye, but it's becoming increasingly rare. The decision is also slightly politically motivated, since I find most of the crap the MPAA tries to pull absolutely reprehensible. It's very sad that piracy is still the best way acquire and consume most media.

Now I spend most of my time either reading or listening to audiobooks. There's tons of amazing content available, and it's typically cheaper than other forms of entertainment. The field is also pretty open and approachable, so anyone can try their hand at writing a book. You don't need a huge budget or anything fancy.

I'm also a big fan of the book community. My experience has been that many book authors are happy to engage in discussions, answer questions, etc. If you shoot em an email, most authors will get back to you (although though most of the bigger names will usually take longer). Providing constructive criticism (especially when they're starting off) can actually lead to improvements in future books!

I think this is what every bear case since 2010 has been saying about Netflix: it was a phenomenal business while they got to exploit the quirky licensing of physical DVDs, but with streaming, content is king.

As many predicted back then (when Tilson wrote his famous letter), the cost of quality content has gone up so much that Netflix has had no choice but to let much of it go and instead produce their own to defend their margin. At some point their core business will simply be content production rather than distribution

“This acquisition and the launch of our direct-to-consumer services mark an entirely new growth strategy for the Company, one that takes advantage of the incredible opportunity that changing technology provides us to leverage the strength of our great brands.”

Any guess who the audience is? Ah yes - shareholders. "We can make money hand over fist by taking our content away from Netflix users, and giving them the choice to pay us on our service, or do without content."

So what about the Marvel shows? I was pretty sure they're Netflix exclusives but Marvel is owned by Disney and the wording in this statement is ambiguous about whether it would be affected or not.

Considering a new service will likely start out as US-only (as they always do) pulling future Marvel shows off Netflix would effectively mean killing them off internationally.

I'd imagine a Disney service would face fewer hurdles for international distribution (though I'm sure Disney was myopic enough to sign exclusive deals prohibiting them from serving some of their own content in some countries) but considering I'm still waiting for YouTube Red[0] to become available, HBO Go[1] isn't really available outside the US (which didn't stop them from handing out swag at European tech conferences) and Hulu[2] is still practically US-only, I'm not so keen on waiting for yet another player to figure out which countries they'll bother supporting.

So far no one has mentioned something that has my tinfoil hat tingling like a mofo. With Net Neutrality being the uncertainty that it is, why would Disney choose to be potentially burdened like this? I see a few possible scenarios: 1) They know something we don't. 2) This move has become a necessity, which I highly doubt given their enormous catalog now. 3) They see the value in pursuing this endeavor no matter the cost.

It's hard to look this up for me, so forgive me, but my assumption is Disney is not one of the big companies that can control the internet. I don't believe BAMtech has peering such as Netflix has caching servers like Youtube so I think this would be very interesting to watch closely.

My personal feeling is that if net neutrality is completely abandoned, Disney has more than enough money to print its way to making this work. I don't know if it'll be good or bad for them to be beholden to the same restrictions as other streaming services or if they'll magically become exempt. With all the properties in Disney's possession now I'm very much reminded of the phrase "too big to fail" but I'm very interested to see how this plays out. I'm hoping for a net positive for everyone involved but lessons of the past have me expecting the worst.

This seems like a race to failure, this nickel and diming. Each content producer will have a min amount per month that they will accept. A consumer only has a certain amount of disposable income. The horizon hurts both sides: consumers will get less content, and no provider will get enough subs to make it work.

The demand for content was met legally through the rise of Netflix and other streamers with large catalogs; consumers could pay one provider one price to get access to entire catalogs across creators.

Once this becomes so costly as each creator has their own minimum cost (HBO + Disney + Netflix + CBS + AMC et nauseum), users will pick only a small number of services, and users will start to go back to piracy in droves. The services will collapse due to lack of subscribers, but instead of going back to releasing the content back to the original services, they will instead sit on it... they won't get the original pricing from, say, Netflix or Hulu because they showed that the alternative, going alone, didn't work: no negotiating power, so they will simply sit on it, like the retail store locations left vacant for years until someone ponies up the expected rent.

This helps no one: the consumer won't pay, the services won't last, and the content gets shelved.

What might work: allowing rapid switching with credits that let one binge on different services for different time periods; allow aggregators to buy mass credits/subs and resell "group subs" that allow discounts to multiple services.

Otherwise, I think this will be a mess. When I start paying more than I did for cable to get the same access, that will be a problem.

> The ESPN-branded multi-sport service [...] including Major League Baseball, National Hockey League [...]

Missing NBA and NFL and subject to regional restrictions and Fox Sports ownership. Any non-cable package that doesn't offer regional broadcasts of ANY of the major 4 is a weak one.

Until the leagues stop with regional restrictions, these sports packages will be hamstrung and never sell on their own. But why would the leagues do this when they can double dip: charge some customers for all-but-local (i.e. blacked out) online (e.g. mlb.tv) and charge others via their cable package for their local teams (i.e. there is no Fox Sports Go w/out cable subscription).

These companies (ESPN and Fox) really need to use their weight to make these leagues and teams stop w/ arbitrary restrictions based on location. But it goes the other direction these days, see the exorbitant prices cable networks pay leagues/teams for exclusive regional broadcast rights (on cable + their online package) and still don't get the right to serve it to someone out-of-region.

Until they use this weight, they will continue to falter because consumers are using their weight.

I am very curious how much money the broadcasters are making with this strategy, and how much money the leagues or ESPN are letting on the table by just allowing this to happen.

Football(soccer for Americans) is definitely the worst offender here, I know it is much more difficult to package and sell these streams because leagues are so fragmented, but if FIFA could use their weight to pull it off it would be gigantic(hell, even if it's just UEFA).

As an expat, I find it absurd it is impossible to get a legal stream to watch my home league, even UEFA champions league streaming is hard enough to get.

Far from that. I am a Brazilian in Europe, cable packages here are terrible, can't get any of the bigger European leagues(and of course, nothing from South America), I have relegated myself to just catch up with the news and watch bigger matches in a bar every now and then.

As a non US citizen it's literally impossible for me to watch the majority of the content I'd like to watch in any legal fashion whatsoever, it's quite disheartening. I already pay for Apple Music and Netflix, but there's simply too many shows that are region locked.

Ugh, maybe I should just give up on trying to pay for these services when they make it this difficult...

Why can't the movie industry learn from the success of Spotify? No one is pirating music any more because Spotify has everything and their dog without geo restriction (at least as far as I am aware), and those who want to buy music can buy unprotected stuff from Apple Music... only the movie industry is bent on total control and profit extraction.

The "success" is not Spotify. I don't care if Spotify makes a loss or not. The "success" is that most people do not pirate music any longer but pay for it, be it via Apple Music and friends or via Spotify (even if the real bill is footed by investors).

Supplications of thanks and exceptional thanksgiving services are basic among all religions after harvests and at other times.The Thanksgiving occasion's history in North America is established in English conventions dating from the Protestant Reformation. It likewise has parts of a gather celebration, despite the fact that the reap in New England happens a long time before the late-November date on which the cutting edge Thanksgiving occasion is commended.

I'm starting to get sick of everyone coming out with their own streaming service. I cancelled my $200/month cable because I could pay $10/month for Netflix. I now pay for Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu...it's starting to add up again. At this rate we're going to be right back where we started.

I believe we are going to see services that will subscribe to all streaming facilities for you (preferably with a discount) and serve content from various studios from a unified interface. Then, we can have the same problem for these "streaming service subscription services". Sad.

I am fast running out of room in my life for yet another streaming service. I already pay for Netflix, Spotify and a couple of other services. It is all becoming too much, if Disney thinks I am going to pay $10 per month for their service they are sadly mistaken. Just because you own Star Wars does not mean people will pay for your platform to exclusively watch it.

I believe this is a huge mistake on Disney's part. Understandably, they want a piece of the pie that Netflix is enjoying but they'll need to offer something pretty special to entice myself and others to signup. If anything, this is just going to make people torrent whenever they encounter some Disney content they want to watch they could previously get on Netflix.

Regarding ESPN, its first party content (not live sports broadcasts) was high quality, delivering both journalism and personality based entertainment to its audience. That quality has dramatically decreased in the last 10-15 years.

TV broadcasts necessitate a one size fits all content strategy where you strike a balance between the degree of content fit with individual users, with the size of the audience you can appeal to. Streaming services have turned things on its head, where stronger niche appeal with inherently smaller audience sizes is winning the day. ESPN needs to address this audience targeting problem if it's going to be successful in the non-live-event segment of sports entertainment.

If there is one studio that can pull off its own streaming service, its Disney. They are being smart in acquiring BAM Tech also, so that they have a good technology in order to launch a solid streaming service.

Disney's great library content, ESPN solid sports + live content combined with BAM Tech's expertise in building a stable video streaming tech stack means Disney has gathered all the right pieces. The question now is how well will Disney be able to combine all its assets into a product that doesnt reflect the org structure!

Hmm. My little sister watches all her Disney tv series on YouTube and she doesn't care how awful the quality is. Sometimes I'm appalled how she can watch Princess Anna (??) in a small screen, at 240px and x2 speed.

As for Disney movies, we tend watch them in cinemas, and if they're really lovable, get them on DVD too.

I get that Disney wants their own ecosystem but I think this one may be redundant. We already fork out monthly subs on Netflix and Amazon Prime (lets not forget Hulu and others are beefing up too) and at least, these services cater for both adults and children.

actually, it's distribution decoupled from actual value creation that has given us things like 4 hour football games with 10 minutes of live play.

I would prefer that content is sold without need for a middle man. Seems easy when spotify does it and there are no commercials but they aren't doing 4k streams. I think top quality spotify is 240 or 320kBPS.

Netflix needs 4x that for their lowest, "wouldn't watch it on my phone" quality stream. It's just going to cost more for these products in a non-broadcast world.

Not everyone can afford a CDN and a lot of other things in between the source and the user, especially creators. Sure, in theory they can just sell video from their sites, but in practice infrastructure costs a lot of money.

Unless video will move to decentralized distribution (pirated one did already, so why can't legal one too), distributors will have their piece of the pie.

I don't doubt it. Pirated distribution has nothing in the way of hosting cost so I don't see how that would work with decentralized distribution.

What is the set up you are advocating for? People automatically upload content from their streaming apps? How are you going to police amazon/netflix/hulu/whatever service I have to do the uploading in a fair way?

My fire TV has 8GB hdd. I don't know what my chrome cast has but it's less. You need real hardware to store the catalog. Torrenting works because it has a bar to entry.

Right, so if people want the convenience, they are going to have to get off their wallets. Broadcast was so cheap because we had central distributions with set times and they just shot it out there and you could watch if you want.

I'd rather providers compete on content and service so I can drop people who shove commercials in my face.

People have spent years complaining about all the channels and nothing to watch and this trend starts to reverse that because the providers are going to have to compete in content.

I don't know about that, distribution decoupled from actual value creation sounds a lot like division of labor, ie the way we've been doing things since the industrial revolution to generally great success. What's the alternative besides inefficiency and duplicated effort?

Middlemen are great, they connect buyers and sellers at scale. Without the broadcasters the NFL wouldn't expect to get paid any less, they'd just squeeze the money out of you directly. Or show you ads. Or both!

I figured we'd get a to point where Netflix[1] is the home of small studio and indie content while the mega-studios would have their own service. Disney has a current and back catalog that would make $20 a month golden.

As an exercise, let's say BBC America started a service with the entire BBC / BBC American catalog. I get the feeling a lot of people would be fine with subscribing. WB would probably do ok, but I'm iffy on CBS / Paramount.

Separate from the "cable2.0" comments... I would say that nurturing/developing the content is harder than the tech side. Not putting down the amazing achievements netflix has made, but if you are trying to show a family a kids movie, it won't matter how the quality is vs. "wow that was a terrible movie". Pixar/LucasFilm/etc. properties that Disney owns are critical, and a streaming/digital footprint is the logical next step.

Without more of that, Disney's amazing brand recognition could turn into a problem for them: because everybody thinks that they know exactly what to expect when they hear "Disney", a Disney-only subscription might feel much more like a monoculuture than one Amazon-only or Netflix-only (assuming those two even go that far towards exclusivity, which might be inevitable if more licensed content leaves)

The more streaming providers they split the content in to, the less likely I am of ever wanting to subscribe to any of them.

Personally I have just given up on streaming, I will buy whatever "good" series/movies they release on sale, on bluray instead, and no I wont pirate their stuff either, I will just skip it completely, I don't want to participate in this any more / help them market/hype their series.

I believe the big win here is that ESPN currently pays a lot of money for broadcast rights of various major league and college sports; those same leagues are paying BAMTech for end-to-end digital "over-the-top" streaming services. Pretty sure this is a sweet reversal on Disney/ESPN's part to own their digital asset management and content delivery systems and even sell them back to sports leagues.

At the very least I wished they'd agree on a mechanism whereby the content is indexed so external clients allow you to search/browse for content (and maybe even find you the best / cheapest way to consume without leaving the client).

I would have thought this would be better for the studios too. I don't mind paying for your stuff but the barrier to finding and consuming it needs to be lower.

Disney is going to lose this bout. Netflix's is more diversified than Disney and one has to ask would the actual consumer want to have two or three streaming services?

Netflix is doing anime, soon comic book movies (they bought Millar world) and they don't have the bricks and mortal politics that the studios have with theaters throughout the planet. i.e. Asia and religious countries.

Netflix and Prime effectively anticipated this by commissioning and owning in-house content.

If the whole industry turns into balkanized streaming sites that each only offer their own stuff, then the result will be that insufficiently popular studios will go bankrupt rather than being low level viable as B-list content on someone else's site.

Its legal to rent a DVD, what if you could play the physical DVD and broadcast it to whoever has rented it? Like redbox but the DVD player is in the cloud somewhere and you are mirroring the stream at your house? I've been wondering if that's legal and if Netflix could do something like that with their DVD collection

Is there any good way to just host a bunch of movies and music thats always available? Plex seems like a valid answer, but should I buy a dedicated server to host it and handle connections? I feel like sticking plex on a macbook and just disabling the screensaved is not a good long term solution.

I recommend Synology NAS. I hear QNAP is better, but less polished and easy. I have a 1515+ which has no problem with transcoding. I suggest HGST NAS drives, 4TB and 6TB, because they have the best Mean-Time-To-Fail, but many people buy WD Reds because hey, it's redundant storage anyways, and Reds are a great value and not bad drives. If you only start with 2-3 drives, the whole thing will cost around $1,300.

Cancelled cable years ago. Just cancelled Netflix today, won't be paying any service anymore and I will reassess the situation in 3 years. If you want me to tolerate your DRM (and many other problems like region blocks) the whole industry needs to rethink their approach. U+1F44F

Would Netflix/HBO really have anything to lose by providing their services in some open way that could be aggregated? The immediate downside is cost of implementing, but on the plus side they'd have people able to access it on platforms that currently can't.

I'd gladly pay for movies. I'd much rather it actually. But until these companies get their shit together and stop hoarding content, I'm pirating it all. I'm not paying monthly subscriptions to 15 different media companies. Screw you guys.

While it was obviously better for Netflix to have it all with one low price, as long as each streaming service allows me to sign up for just one month only, and stream shows ad free, on demand, the full seasons, I'm okay with this.

Too bad these streaming survices are run by companies with unlimited money, otherwise I would hope for some big crash where only the few good ones survived. Not that I want a monopoly situation either, so... Never mind, I guess.

Well, if it is not on Netflix, Amazon, HBO it does not exist (only exception is rare international content) for me. I certainly do not care about Walt Disney as they turn everything into a shitshow that they touch like StarWars.

I wonder if this has to do with the Vid Angel/Disney lawsuit and the recent workaround that allows Vid Angel to filter Disney movies on Netflix. By moving their movies off of Netflix, they effectively block Vid Angel again.

They were able to buy BAMTech outright, and BAMTech has better live event streaming. I don't think this is an investment play for Disney. I think it's about what gives them the best streaming platform that's completely under their control.

Netflix's deal with Disney dates all the way back to 2012, although it only ramped up last year with current theatrical releases. Given they're still providing films to Netflix until 2019 I think they probably had a standard break clause.

More interesting to me is how this impacts the Marvel deals Netflix has. They're covered by separate deals, but will Disney be looking to slowly consolidate all their Marvel TV content under their own streaming platform?

1) Subscribe to only one or two services at a time. Binge the stuff you missed while you weren't subscribed, then drop it and switch. Works if you don't care about discussing stuff with people as it airs. Less good if many of the services penalize short-term subscriptions.

2) Abandon digital-delivery TV/Movies. Use the friggin' library, and spend what you would have on streaming buying discs instead. Downside: storing stuff sucks, library less convenient than streaming but honestly we're talking about giant wasteful time sinks to begin with so oh well.

3) Just pirate. If there's stuff not commercially available that you want you'll be doing this anyway, and it's barely more effort/expense to maintain the hard drives, backups, and playback infra for a handful of your shows/movies than it is to do so for all your shows/movies.

#1 is my current method of dealing with all the content out there. I keep a list of movies/shows on each platform that I'm interested in watching. When the size of the list grows to a critical mass for a given platform, I'll subscribe for a month or two and binge them all.

I wonder if companies like HBO plan for this type of usage and schedule their shows to start and end at times that would necessitate paying for an extra month of service.

People absolutely are paying for separate services. There's a limit to how many, but many, many people are paying for Netflix + HBO, or Amazon + HBO, because they believe HBO delivers value for the money. In contrast, I suspect very few people are likely to sign up for the CBS service, Star Trek or not, because I don't think many people believe CBS delivers value for the money.

Disney is banking on people believing they deliver value for the money. For parents of young children, maybe they do. Certainly more than "nobody" will agree.

I'm glad to see someone bring up Star Trek and CBS's streaming service. They seem to think the new Trek series will save CBS All Access; I would contend that CBS All Access will kill their Trek series. I've heard from people who tried it, they said the stream quality is terrible from both an audio and video perspective. If you're going to bet on your own streaming platform, you really shouldn't cheap out on the tech.

> Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that the company surpassed 2 million domestic HBO Now subscribers during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. He later added that subscriptions tripled in 2016 compared to the end of 2015, which implies closer to 2.4 million subscribers.

That's a fraction of Netflix's US subscriber base, but it's not nobody.

I will probably get downvoted, but I find it annoying that articles which are relevant only in the US omit this simple fact in the title. The US is an important country, but only about 5% of the world population lives there.